[For the departed and living members of the University of Ibadan Class of 1967]
This past week, a member of my matriculating class of 1967 at the University of Ibadan reportedly passed away at an airport. He was a retired Permanent Secretary of the old Cabinet Office, the equivalent of the present post of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation. He was a highly respected and beloved member of our class of U.I. alums. As the reader will soon discover, this piece was sparked by news of his demise, precisely the location of his death. May his gentle and affable soul rest in peace. But what do I have to say in this essay?
First, a very quick clarification is needed to start us off. The part of the title which talks of “we who are about to die” is a translation of the Latin sentence, “Morituri te salutant”. It refers to the well-known practice in ancient imperial Rome in which gladiators in the Coliseum would first hail the Emperor before the beginning of their fights to the death – with one another or with dangerous animals like lions and tigers. The full ritual salutation went like this: “Ave, imperator, morituri te salutant – Hail, Emperor, we who are about to die salute you”. With this clarification, it should be obvious, I hope, that I do not in the least think that members of my matriculating class of 1967 at the University of Ibadan to whom this piece is dedicated are literally about to die – heavens forbid! If that is the case, what then do I have in mind?
Well, first of all, when members of this class of U.I. alumni/alumna run into one another, we/they talk about a lot of things mostly about the lives we have led since we graduated. We share memories of our time at U.I. But also we talk about death – of both the recently departed and of those who have died in the decades since 1970, the year in which we graduated. In my memory or calculation, this habit or practice of talking about and around death has been going on now for about a decade and half, starting from the time when most of us were in our mid-fifties. Since this probably happens with all sets of “old boys” and “old girls” of secondary schools and tertiary institutions that survive to old age, the question arises as to what is so special about its occurrence within the ranks of the members of the U.I. class of ’67? Here is the answer to this conundrum in the Nigerian context: of all the matriculating classes of the University of Ibadan before and after 1967, ours is by far the most active, most visible, most philanthropic and best organized. When all the members of such a set, such a generation shall have passed away, what a phenomenal thing that would be!
It is not an empty boast that ours is unique among all the classes or sets of U.I. alumna/alumni. Well, if it is a boast, there is solid evidence to back it up. One “evidence” among many others: ask Femi Osofisan, or Niyi Osundare, or G.G. Darah, or Odia Ofeimun whether sufficiently large members of each person’s respective set have organized themselves and made generous donations in cash or kind to their alma mater remotely close to what the class of 1967 has done. Indeed, ask any of them whether an organized formation of their set exists!
In case members of my own class turn around to accuse “socialists” like me and Eddie Madunagu that we have not been active at all in the meetings and activities of the class of ‘67, I plead guilty on behalf of Eddie and myself but give every assurance that we do not write off our set-mates as scions of the Nigerian bourgeoisie! Well, let me speak for myself and leave Eddie to offer his own explanation if he so wishes – which I doubt. At least, I have been present at meetings a few times when I happened to be at the home of Sade and Yemi Ogunbiyi which is like a home away from home for me. Sade Ogunbiyi, the Iyalode of Remo, is one of the most active and resourceful leaders of the organized body of the class of ‘67 and through her, Yemi has been accepted as an honorary member of the set, even though his own set is that of 1968.
On a more serious note and to bring these observations directly to the subject of this essay, I write here of the members of the class of ’67 as perhaps the most focused formation of my/our generation of the educated elite of our country. In other words, I am making no special claims of moral or ideological exceptionalism for this particular cohort beyond the simple fact that it is the best cross-section that we have of my/our generation. More precisely, I make the observation that when the last woman or man in our class of 1967 would have departed, it would mean that the most visible and effectively organized body of any matriculating set in the history of the oldest tertiary educational institution in our country would have disappeared into the night of time and experience. Of course, I have a personal, existential interest in hoping fervently that this will not happen any time soon!
But it will come to pass. And thinking more broadly now and projecting this thought to the many confounding emotions around the phenomenon of death and dying about which we talk a lot, I ask: even if we know and accept the fact that every generation shall pass away, how do we, individually and collectively, confront this inevitability when the generation in question is our own generation? Do we do so cheerfully? “Well, my generation is passing away, ka dupe!” With the dread and the desperation that have transformed India into the 37th state of our country as the place to go and try to hang on to life when the other 36 states have failed us? Or in stoic resignation like the gladiators of ancient Rome? “Hail, emperor, we who are about to die salute you”. But we are not gladiators and we are not in imperial Rome. We are in Nigeria, a democratic and quasi-theocratic state. And so, we who, generationally are about to die, do we accept our fate and salute, not an emperor, not the president, but God is credited with giving us life itself? “All Hail, Igwe/Daddy/Baba/Jesu, we who are about to die, na your hand we dey o, and we salute you”! By a long shot, I think this is the most appropriate or pertinent response of most of the members of my generation to this ultimate enigma of all enigmas.
A particularly sardonic form of cheerfulness in the face of the looming disappearance of all the members of my/our generation lies behind the semantically haunting term “the departure lounge of life” that is part of the title of this piece. It was one of our classmates, Dr. Olugbemi Akinkoye, B.Sc. Sociology (First Class Honors) 1970, (aka “Sir Koye!”) who, in a literal instantiation of graveyard humor, first coined the term and popularized it amongst some of us before it finally achieved currency far beyond our circles. Happily, although it is more than a decade now since “Sir Koye” coined the term, he is still around and in good shape. In other words, he personally has been siting for a long time now in this existential departure lounge. Long may he tarry there!
Many improvisations have been made on the term, all reflecting our individual and collective acknowledgment of the fact that, again generationally speaking, our time is running out. Some hope for cancelled flights as they sit it out with fate in that departure lounge of sentient, physical existence. Others talk of the notoriety of the now defunct national airline, Nigerian Airways, for often not having a plane on the ground for scheduled flights. They say, please God, please Abasi, please Chukwu and Olodumare, let Death, the Grim Reaper, be like the Nigerian Airways! This is my own contribution, derived from the fact that in my younger days during and immediately after our undergraduate years, I had a notoriety for arriving late for air travels, thus missing many flights: I tell my friends, my classmates, that my spirit will revert to that habit of my youth and I shall miss many flights since, at the times when the plane arrives for me, I wouldn’t be anywhere close to that noumenal departure lounge!
In conclusion of these haunted musings around the passing away of an entire generation, I draw the reader’s attention to something that I rather casually mentioned earlier in this discussion. This is the fact that this whole matter of mild to increasingly obsessive concern on our individual and collective appointment with death started when we were in our middle to late fifties. Please note, dear reader, that for some time now, the figure for our country’s life expectancy at birth has been 51 or 52. Indeed, at one stage in the last decade, it was as low as 48. Rather uncannily, it means that without being in the least aware of the fact, we, members of the class of ’67 and our entire generation, started becoming psychically burdened by intimations of our mortality when we arrived at the figure for life expectancy at birth for our country. Fast forward to a decade and a half later and those of us who went far beyond that ghoulish statistic of 52 years begin to talk of being at the departure lounge of life. Meanwhile, let me reveal here that every American colleague of my age bracket with whom I have discussed this issue has been utterly incredulous, indeed stupefied that men and women in their seventies should feel that they are in this departure lounge of existence. The figure for life expectancy for the United States is 79. And from anecdotal evidence, I can confirm that most of my colleagues here at Harvard both younger and older than me expect to live well beyond their seventies. Indeed, the very idea of a “departure lounge of life” seems funny but also wildly aberrational to them!
I expect that the figure for life expectancy at birth for our country will rise in the coming years and decades, perhaps considerably. Indeed, I hope and pray for this to happen. I use the word “pray” here in the iwalesin sense that life, existence itself, is a prayer, especially in a country like ours in which, for most of the people, living and dying are experienced with and in great suffering and hardship. One day, life expectancy at birth in our country will be 78, 80, 82 or 84, Insha Allah. We whose time in this life is still rigidly tied to the current figure of 52 will not be around then. But we can and should work for it. This is for our own good. But also, it is for the greatest public good of our society. Why? For any country’s life expectancy figure to rise, so many other indices of good, dignified living will also have to rise. I admit that these are counterintuitive thoughts from the present departure lounge of life in which my generation is transfixed in fear and hope, dread and resignation. But what do we have to lose in having such counterfactual thoughts, what?
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
