I am a Marxist and a socialist and have been so since 1973. I am also strongly influenced by anti-sexism, humanism and revolutionary internationalism. I have remained committed to what Karl Marx called the categorical imperative, that is the struggle to overcome all circumstances in which the human being is humiliated, enslaved, abandoned and despised… As I have said publicly on several occasions, this commitment comes before everything else, including family, ethnic group and nationality.
Edwin Madunagu, The Nigerian Left: Introduction to History [2016, p 183]
Thank you very much, but please let us put awaythe fears, the worriesof the faint-hearted among us that socialism is dead in our country and our world. Indeed, without being in the least complacent about the challenges ahead of us, let us rest assured that prospects for a post-capitalist era of political, economic and social justice for the vast majority of our people in Nigeria and the peoples of our planet are as good now as they were more than forty years ago when, in the Anti-Poverty Movement of Nigeria (APMON), we first became, instantly and forever, lifelong comrades in working class activism. What is this all about? Well, it is about a quiet but unshakable reaffirmation that Eddie and Bene Madunagu and I made this past Tuesday at Calabar a few hours before my departure for Lagos after a short visit to the couple.
Of course, this undiminished belief in socialism and its bright prospects for the future of our country and the human community will strike many of the readers of this tribute as utterly fanciful. Outside of a very narrow group of what could be regarded as its diehard adherents, the visibility, not to talk of influence, of socialism in the politics of this country is at the present time near zero. More pointedly, in sharp contrast with things as they were only two decades ago, not a single one of our ruling class parties at the present time has anything in its ideology or policies vaguely reminiscent ofsocialism; without exception, they are all for neoliberalism, for privatization of all our public enterprises and unfettered deregulation.And in the world at large, the number of the nation-states of the world that are either actually socialist or socialist-inclined is countable in single, not double digits. Given this general background of national and global politics at the present time, is this faith in promising future prospects for socialism in Nigeria and the world merely an ‘audacity of hope’, as in Barack Obama’s book of the same title?
Yes, it is; except that it is far more than the audacity of a hope that has nothing behind it other than hope itself. Beyond hope as hope, beyond a simple and uncomplicated faith that in the end things will work out for the good, what we have here is the completely rational certitude of Eddie Madunagu, the greatest materialist historian andarchivist of socialism and the Left in our country’s political history, that in the long view of things,historyis on the side of socialism, not capitalism.Madunagu arrived at this certitude not through romantic, fanciful ideas of something innate or natural in socialism and socialists but through an unwavering engagement as much with the defeats as with the victories of the past, present and future of the Left in the struggles for justice for workers and the poor in Nigeria. Indeed, of the many achievements of this comrade among comrades, it is thistotal dedication to going back again and again to the archives of where things went either wrong or right with leftists and socialists in this country that I wish to single out for discussion in this tribute to Madunagu on his 70th birthday anniversary today, Sunday, May 15, 2016. But before coming to this specific subject, it is helpful to locate Madunagu among the group of extraordinary human beings that it has been my great good fortune to have come across in the Nigerian socialist movement in the last four and half decades.
After dedicating my first published book to my father and my maternal grandmother, my second book, The Truthful Lie, was dedicated to three comrades: Seinde Arigbede, Edwin Madunagu and Ntiem Kungwai, respectively a neuro-surgeon; a mathematician; and a political scientist.I confess that before my separate and joint encounters with these three men on Nigerian soil, it was only in the anti-war and anti-imperialist, Third World liberation support movements in the United States that I had met socialists and leftists that were not only brilliant and highly regarded in their chosen professional fields but were also deeply caring human beings with a great passion for justice, equality and dignity for all people, especially the most downtrodden. It is rather strange, both to recollect and to admit this fact now, but back then in the early to mid-70s, the socialists that I had met in Nigeria were, with few exceptions, stereotypical ‘firebrand socialists’ that were mercilessly caricatured in the daily press, in novels and plays and in the lambasting tirades of right-wing politicians like the late S.L. Akintola.
As incredible as this assertion may seem now, especially to readers of this piece below the age of forty, at one time socialists and leftists were widely considered a very strange breed of men and women in our country and our continent. True, some of themdid strike fear and terror in the governments of this country, but only on the basis of a wildly irrational hysteria that saw a looming showdown with communism that was more imagined than real, a hysteria that was in fact manufactured and stoked by ideological proxy wars of the East-West Cold War. Arigbede, Madunagu and Kungwai were the first of the dozens of socialists and leftists that I was to meet in the course of the next two decades that nobody, no government, no rabid right-wing ideologues could easily write off as rabble-rousers, as losers who turned to socialism only because they had been unable to make it in their professions, their private lives, their lackluster forays into bourgeois politics.The list is much too long to give here in its inclusive entirety, but in the 70s and 80s, it was a life-changing experience for me and many others to meet in the socialist movements in this country women and men of the intellectual and moral caliber of people like Segun Osoba; Bala Usman; Toye Olorode; Mahmud Tukur; Dipo Fasina; Molara Ogundipe; Benedicta Madunagu; Idowu Awopetu; Ropo Sekoni; Ngozi Ojidoh; Kayode Adetugbo; Mohammed Sokoto; Dunni Arigbede; Festus Iyayi; G.G. Darah; Tony Engurube; Princewill Alozie; Asisi Asobie; Grace Osakwe; Jibo Ibrahim; Rauf Mustapha. Above all other considerations, what was particularly remarkable about these men and women was the fact that, placing their personal brilliance and professional successes at the service of a cause that was much greater than each person, they created organizations that were unparalleled in their effectiveness in the history of the left in this country, organizations like ASUU, Women in Nigeria (WIN), and NANS. This is precisely the point at which Edwin Madunagu’s almost unique contribution comes into the picture.
At this point in time, I think it is fair for me to say that it is common knowledge in the circles of socialists and leftists in our country that Eddie Madunagu and myself are so close in our positions, our views and our interventions that we are almost inseparable. To this, I can add that we have both been very concerned, very dedicated to documenting and informing Nigerians and the world of the struggles of the Left especially against the background of the distortions and crises of capitalist underdevelopment in our country. However, I think that while a few comrades and compatriots on the Left know of Eddie’s work of careful and painstaking documentation, most people are not aware of just how very deep and wide this work is, especially with regard to the past – or rather, the many pasts – of the socialist, feminist, workers’ and mass movements in Nigeria.
I draw the attention of the reader to the fact that, for the very first time in this tribute, I have just alluded to the diversity, the multiplicity of the many levels and strands of leftists and socialists in our country. As a matter of fact, I now in addition draw the reader’s attention to the fact that the list of dedicated socialists, feminists and radical leftists that I gave earlier in this piece is dominated by academics and intellectuals. Though he is himself an academic and a scientist, Eddie Madunagu’s sustained work as the quintessentialhistorian and archivist of the Left in Nigeria has ranged far beyond academia to a consistently ecumenical purview that takes in virtually all the major figures and key players of the past and the present, in essence demonstrating that genuine and passionate socialism did not begin with the present generation. Permit me to give a succinct elaboration of this observation.
Among the many published works of Eddie are the following that are crucial for an understanding of the victories and defeats, the successes and reversals of the Left in this country: The Philosophy of Violence (1976); The Tragedy of the Nigerian Socialist Movement (1980); Human Progress and Its Enemies (1982); Problems of Socialism: the Nigerian Challenge (1983); The Political Economy of State Robbery (1984); The Making and Unmaking of Nigeria (2001); and Understanding Nigeria and the New Imperialism(2006).Not included in this list is the considerable number of journalistic pieces that Eddie published both while he was on the editorial board of The Guardian and later as an unattached stringer. There are also many written but as yet unpublished manuscripts in his vast output. Thus, what we confront in this immense corpus of Madunagu’s writings is an array of issues and subjects too vast to be grouped under a single theme. But even so, a careful perusal of the published and unpublished materials will readily reveal the consistency with which Eddie has been obsessed by the avoidable errors, the missed breakthroughs, the promising roads not taken. Speaking only for myself, I have been particularly awed by the passion and scrupulousness with which Eddie has approached the lives and works of what we now know as the Old Left, all in a bid to tease out what connections and legacies, positive and negative, they have with us. In the writings of no other major figure of the Nigerian Left at the present time will you find figures like Pa Curtis Joseph, Pa Michael Athokhamien Imoudu, S.G. Ikoku, Tayo Akpata, Eskor Toyo, Ola Oni and the Zikist revolutionaries of pre-independence Nigeria. And here, it is necessary for me to point out that in many cases, Eddie actually sought out and had extensive interviews with these figures before they passed on;and some of them indeed not only gave full access to our indomitable archivist but in fact donated their papers to the holdings of the Calabar International Institute for Research, Information and Documentation (CIINSTRID) that Eddie, with the cooperation of a few other comrades including this writer, founded in 1994. By the way, CIINSTRID is the only free research institution and public library of the Left on the African continent.
The work of Eddie Madunagu has been monumental; but it is still unfinished.As I wish my friend and comrade a hearty welcome to the club of septuagenarians that I joined only five months ago, I wish to applaud the vastness of the archives that he has bequeathed to us. In those archives are the details of the many problems that socialism and socialists have faced in our country and our part of the world. What we must now do is square off those archives with the archives of the problems and challenges that socialism and socialists have faced in the world at large. It so happens that the prospects for a post-capitalist future are indeed much brighter in many other parts of the world than in our country at the present time. But we are part of the world at large, thanks in part to global capitalism. No comrade that I know understands and appreciates this contradiction better and keener than Edwin Madunagu.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
