Earlier this week on Thursday, April 13, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, former Head of the Theatre Arts Department at the University of Ife and former MD and CEO of Daily Times of Nigeria, turned 70. He is quite possibly the biggest producer and distributor of textbooks in Nigeria. He not only has knowledge of that trade as much as any other person in the country does, he is the profession’s best example of conscientious, indefatigable and sophisticated practice. Since he left academia more than two decades ago, he has succeeded superlatively in everything he has done. For a man who is neither a politician nor a self-promoting socialite, he is widely known and admired by the public for his professional abilities, and for his uncanny ways of bringing people of all stations in life and of diverse social, ethnic and religious backgrounds together. When, some months ago, he was appointed the new Chairman of the governing council of the University of Ife, the acclaim that the announcement generated was near universal. More on this point later in this tribute. Thus, Dr. Ogunbiyi is a man of great accomplishments and in all likelihood, a man of still greater things to come. He is also, of course, Yemi, one of my three closest friends. This is the vantage point from which I am writing this tribute because, quite literally, much of what life and the world have meant for me has come mostly from my very close friends among whom Yemi is quite distinctive.
It was in secondary school thatYemi and I first met and became, instantly and forever, friends who are very much like brothers. In the long period of more than a half century since then, Yemi has remained the same in the things that make him so uniquethat all who know him seem agreed that he is truly one of a kind. These things include a generosity so unstinting, so limitless that it has become the stuff of legend to all who know him; a gregariousness that is so capacious, so elemental that he is always the centre of interest, the heart and soul of any gathering in which you find him; and a kindness that is so unlimited that it makes no distinction between family members, friends and complete strangers.On this last point, I often tell our mutual friend and acquaintances that unlike most people we know who became “generous” when they became rich, Yemi was the essence of generosity long before all of us became who we are today in our late adulthood. For instance, in our boarding house in high school, Yemi was the only student in the entire school who shared his provisions liberally with everybody, to the point where half-way through nearly every term, he would have become “provision-less”! As anyone who has ever been a resident of a boarding house knows, this is nothing short of disastrous. But to Yemi, it was nothing at all. I was personally greatly impressed by this otherworldly generosity of my friend, so much so that I tried to follow his example. Well, l had better keep silent about my failure in the effort lest some mischievous people retroactively use this confession to query the genuineness of my socialism!
I do not wish to mythologize my friend in this tribute. He is not entirely who he was in our teenage years going to the period of our young adulthood. Who among us is? For instance, there is one quite remarkable change in Yemi that strikes me as nothing short ofa sea change. What is this change? Well, he now has a very sharp and deflationary sense of humor that we his schoolmates, did not associate with him in secondary school. Yemi did not exactly have a saintly, altar boy personality, but it was very rare indeed to find him corrosively, if also good-naturedly teasing anybody. But now, he is the Balogun of playful, teasing apara dida! I think this serves him as a sort of tonicor tactic for negotiating those unexpected turns to negativity and unpleasantness that suddenly spring up in human interactions and affairs. The world is a hard, hard place and as Sigmund Freud demonstrated in his classic monograph, Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious, humor, sharp-edged humor, often helps to negotiate moments of tension and or unpleasantness. In drawing attention to this factor, I am, I hope, rendering my friend a service because from now on, anyone who gets a sample of Yemi’scaustic, teasing “awada” or “apara” will be obliged to go and read Freud in order to appreciate the usefulness of the sting in his mischievous his jokes!
Beyond this basically blameless and harmless teasing habit, there are two big things in which, over the years, Yemi has changed significantly. Because he will probably be surprised by my identifying and even making much of these two changes, I wish to make them the pivot around which I will weave my thoughts, my wishes for my friend on this occasion of his 70th birthday anniversary.
The first of these two changes pertains to attitude and predisposition toward religion in general and Christianity in particular.I could express this simply by saying that Yemi has become more religious, more of a practicing Christian than he was in the long period that spans our teenage years in high school, through our undergraduate years at UI, to the time of our young adulthood as graduate students at New York University and young lecturers at the University of Ife (OAU). But this does not adequately express precisely what I have in mind. After all, these days, people in all stations of life in our country are turning to religion in mighty wavesof new converts every day. In such a context, to say, simply, that someone has become more religious is to say something quite banal. What I find in Yemi is different from this phenomenon. I can think of no better way of expressing it than to say that he has become a real true believer, a practicing man of faith fired by the moral and philosophical tenets of Christianity, without however clothing his Christian activism in the cheap and showy garb of thereligiosity that is the defining mark of Christianity in our country today.No, Yemi is a man who serves God with genuine but unostentatious rectitude.
Here, I must make a “confession” of sorts. Many times, as I have watched Yemi unfailinglygo to church every Sunday and on special occasions, and as I have observed him spend huge chunks of his time, his energies and his material resources in furtherance of good deeds promoted by his church, it has crossed my mind to ask him exactly what religion, what his Christian faith means to him. But we have not had that discussion because I have not posed the question to him. Perhaps in this tribute lies the beginnings of that conversation? I do not know. What I do know is that his birthday immediately precedes Easter which, as we know, is the central cycle of symbolic ceremonies in Christianity. The cycle starts with the Lenten period of fasting and deep soul searching and ends with Easter Monday that is laden with the symbolism of renewal and regeneration attached to the resurrection of Christ. Since my friend has become a faithful and committed Christian, that is one of the two major things that I wish to reflect upon in this tribute.
Concerning the second big change, I am not exactly sure what kind of a change it is, even as I am certain that it is a big, big change. To put it briefly, here is what it is. Believe it or not, at one time, Yemi was an avowed socialist like many of us who still remain socialists whilst he has “moved on”, so to speak. Yes, he was not one of the so-called “hard” Left. But he was a member of the editorial board of our journal, Positive Review, a journal that was unapologetically socialist and Marxist. He was one of the socialists whom our elder and mentor, Wole Soyinka, savagely attacked and derided as “Leftocrats”. The term “Leftocrat”, in Soyinka’s bitingly sarcastic coinage, conjoins “Left” and “autocrat”. Thus, by the term, Soyinka meant a hard and dogmatic Left. For this reason, the fact that Yemi was one of the principal targets of Soyinka’s ire in that attack against us meant that the Nobel laureate not only saw Yemi as one of us, he saw him as an essential member of our group. But gradually, from that location in the storm centre of the maelstrom of Leftist ideology and politics, Yemi “moved on”, so to speak. But then, it is at precisely this juncture that I locate Yemi’s movement to Christian social activism. Is there a link between the two? Is there a connection between moving on from socialism and moving to Christian activism? Does one “moving on” reflect the other, no matter how obscure or incommensurable this might seem?
Since the abstract theological, ideological and philosophical dimensions of this question are much too big for the present discussion, I will not deal with them. Instead, I go back to the earlier mentioned symbolism of Lent and Easter: after fasting, after chastening hardship and soul searching comes renewal and regeneration. I see the widespread praise for Yemi’s appointment as the Chairman of the Governing Council of the University of Ife as symbolic of the long and interminable period of Lent in the experience of the University of Ife itself and most of the public, state-financed universities in Nigeria. It is impossible to overstate the depth of hardship, confusion and misdirection in OAU, the depth of a Lenten mortification of spirit, soul and mind that the university has undergone, with particular reference to the students and the faculty. I can testify as his friend that Yemi has been deeply, deeply moved by the outpouring of sentiments of goodwill and expectations of renewal and regeneration that have been expressed to him. No one has expressed this in the specific idiom of Christian symbolism, but the resonance is unmistakable. I cannot imagine that in his moments of reflection and insight meditation, Yemi can fail to see the intimations of this Christian symbolism.
Christianity has deep, formative theological and cultural roots with socialism. The early Church was the religion of the poor and the oppressed; it was openly and doctrinally socialistic. Organized Christianity became the religion of the wealthy and the powerful when Emperor Constantine made it a state religion. Christ himself was deeply averse to usurious capitalism. And throughout history, some of the most humane and lasting effects of Christian social activism have been directed at the liberation of the poor, the downtrodden, the neglected. Thinking of these buried or forgotten aspects of the history of Christianity, I draw your attention, Yemi, to the fact that just as you were once a socialist, your religion also has an honorable and proud history of socialistic humanism. This is thus both a Christian and People’s Memo to you as the new Chairman of the Governing Council of our beloved OAU. It comes with fervent wishes for long life, health, and great success in the next ofthe many great challenges you have faced and mastered in the course of the last four decades. The rich, the powerful, the well-connected will flock to you in your new assignment. In their memos to you, they will lay emphasis on big, heavy capitalization, with much of the contracts of course going to them. And so of course will the marginalized, the excluded, together with their leaders and representatives, come to you with pleas for cooperation, fairness and accountability. May the Easter of unprecedented renewal and regeneration follow the Lenten tales of hardship and crises that you will no doubt hear daily as you move to start the great work ahead of you.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
