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  • Femi Osofisan’s ‘Nkrumah ni…Africa ni’Femi Osofisan’s

    Femi Osofisan’s ‘Nkrumah ni…Africa ni’Femi Osofisan’s

    At the root of the recent spate of resurgent coups in some West African countries particularly Mali, Bourkina Faso and Niger – all French speaking – were allegations by the putschists of the continuing suffocation of their respective countries by the persistence and deepening of French neocolonialism. The former French colonial power apparently granted what the late Professor Bade Onimode described as ‘flag’ or ‘nominal’ independence to its former colonies while retaining a strangle hold on their economies, resources and monetary systems which were tied to the apron strings of the erstwhile ‘mother country’. But neocolonialism, many would argue, is a prevalent phenomenon across Africa not only limited to the French speaking territories.

    Incidentally over six decades ago, one of Africa’s foremost pan-Africanists and cerebral leaders, the immortal Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana had published an exhaustive and penetrating treatise on neocolonialism and its linkage with the persistence of exploitation and underdevelopment on the continent. In the introduction to the 263-page book, Nkrumah writes that “The essence of neocolonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside…The result of neocolonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed part of the world. Investment Under neocolonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world”.

    The renowned playwright, Femi Osofisan’s, dramatic depiction of Nkrumah’s years in exile in Conakry, capital of Guinea, after his overthrow in a military coup in 1965, was first published by Opon Ifa Readers in 1999 but has featured in several stage performances in different parts of the world. It runs into 178 pages subdivided into 46 mostly short scenes. Osofisan, a noted radical pan-Africanist scholar and creative writer himself, is an obvious admirer of Nkrumah.

    In the foreword to the published play, the dramatist writes, “Kwame Nkrumah, known immemorially as the “Osagyefo” (the Victor), was the first leader of a black, independent African country. The British colonialists had called the territory the Gold Coast; under the Osagyefo, it changed its name to Ghana, in echo of the great African empire of that name. Nkrumah was a fervid nationalist, a socialist. and dogged apostle of Pan Africanism, and he welcomed to Ghana many of the liberation movements, to the great annoyance of the western powers, in those days of the Cold War. In 1965 therefore, while he was in China, on a peace mission to Hanoi, a coup d’etat was carried out in Ghana, replacing his regime with that of a self-declared “National Liberation Council” led by the Kotoka-Africa-Harley triumvirate”.

    ‘Nkrumah ni…Africa ni’ is thus an imaginative, dramatic recreation of Nkrumah’s years in exile in Conakry in Guinea, where the no less radical Sekou Toure with revolutionary socialist inclinations was President. This was also at a time when Amilcar Cabral, head of the PAIGC, the militant Guinea-Bissau liberation movement was resident in Conakry where the headquarters of the PAIGC was located. As Osofisan notes, “Thus, by a strange coincidence of history, three of the most radical African leaders lived in this small town of Conakry for six full years! They met, according to reports, almost every day, to talk and work out the strategies for the full emancipation of Africa. But sadly, no record of their discussions exists…I am fascinated. What did these three remarkable figures discuss in those years? What, in their death, has Africa lost – or gained? This is the first of a trilogy about these leaders, and the emphasis is on Nkrumah, the first of them to die”.

    The cast in the play include Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Amilcar Cabral, Andree Toure, wife of President Toure, Jane, assistant to Nkrumah, Nyamikey, Nkrumah’s nephew, Ambrose Yankey, Chief of the Ghanaian security guards and a group of jesters who come on stage intermittently to mock Nkrumah to his utter irritation and disdain. Through fascinating dialogue, the playwright captures the psychology of political leadership in Africa and the political Messianism that ultimately spelt the doom of an otherwise visionary and deeply patriotic leader like Nkrumah.

    Read Also: Femi Osofisan blossoms in Writers’ Village

    An excerpt of an insightful conversation between Jane, Nkrumah’s assistant and admirer, and Cabral, for instance, goes like this:

    Jane: You say that, yet you never stop arguing with him, contradicting him all the time!

    Cabral: I have to, eh! So I love him, but he made mistakes, didn’t he? Enormous mistakes. And we need to recognize those mistakes, and analyze them properly, in order not to repeat them.

    Jane: You don’t seem to take into account the fact that Kwame was a pioneer, without any examples behind him. And without friends he could trust.

    Cabral: …Jane, Nkrumah had many enemies no doubt. But suppose his downfall came from elsewhere- from the flaws in his own vision?

    Jane: I don’t understand.

    Cabral: It’s not too clear to me yet, I admit. I know he had a dream, so large that it embraced the whole continent. For him, it was always, indeed is still, Africa first before anything else. I think the problem was probably there, that in the pursuit of that dream, he lost contact with his home base. And Ghanaians began to feel that he had abandoned them.

    In the play we go through anguished scenes of Nkrumah and his aides’ dashed hopes when attempts to return him to power through counter coups by his supporters within Ghana failed. He comes across as a flawed visionary with great hopes for African unity and Ghana’s rapid transformation who, however, appeared to have lost touch with the realities of his people.

    And even in Guinea, an increasingly paranoid Sekou Toure is cracking down heavily on and executing those perceived as opposed to his government and thus engaged in treachery against the nation. His hold on power is increasingly threatened and fragile. The most humane and compassionate among the three in his attitude to and philosophy of power was Cabral. But was that because his country was still struggling from Portuguese colonialism at the time and his movement was not yet in control of state power?

    This play vividly captures the strengths and weaknesses, follies and foibles of three of the most charismatic of the immediate post-independence African leaders and their largely failed struggles against neocolonialism. Is there anything that contemporary African leaders can learn from their experiences?

  • Are they imploding, are they collapsing, our private universities? – Postscript to a conversation at Ife

    It was Saturday evening, the day after I was conferred with the honorary D.Lit. degree at OAU-Ife. Nearly all the guests, the friends, the former students and the well-wishers had left. Only a few of us, former members of the Ibadan-Ife Group, were left: me, Yemi Ogunbiyi, Femi Osofisan and Odia Ofeimun. Ogaga Ifowodo was also there, but he hadn’t been a member of the group on account of the fact that he had been too young then and was still an undergraduate to have belonged to the group. Kole Omotoso, who had of course been a key member of the group, had left the previous day, the day of the ceremonies. We were at the Pro-Chancellor’s lodge as guests of Yemi, amongst all of us the closest to the enlightened, liberal fraction of the country’s social and political elite. I mention this fact because we often tease him about it, fully aware that he is never short of appropriately sharp and winning responses to our jibes at him. But that night, there were no jibes, no wisecracks, no queries and rebuttals; there was only the most engaged, soul-searching conversation about the crises of higher education in our country. And since Yemi occupies an institutionally influential place in the nation’s educational infrastructure, he became the axis point of the conversation.

    In my recollection, the very serious, almost alarmist dimension to the conversation began when Yemi startled all of us by declaring that private universities were failing and failing fast in the country, so much so, according to him, that we might soon end up where we started – higher education, university education almost entirely or squarely back as the primary responsibility of the state, as a bedrock of public service and social good. I immediately confessed that I was/am completely ignorant of this fact that was being so imperiously declared by Yemi. As a matter of fact, I went on to add an observation to my confession of ignorance of this putative fact of our private universities allegedly failing and failing relentlessly: in the early 1980s, I had done an interview with the late Ulli Beier in which I had predicted that private universities would never take off, let alone survive and last in Nigeria because we have no real venture capitalists who can wait for the decades that it would take for any private university to begin to yield high profit margins from the initial heavy capital investment. But it had seemed that my prediction had been rubbished by the very rapid mushrooming of private universities in our country, many of them seeming to be profitable in little of no time at all. But here was Yemi last Saturday night at Ife, indirectly confirming that early 1980s prediction of mine with his categorical declaration that the private universities were folding up and closing shop one by one by one!

    Is this a “secret” known to all but “hidden” from me because for several decades now I have only lived part of the time in the country, spending most of the months of every year abroad? Perhaps. I leave you, dear reader, to be the judge: how much informed are you personally about this hugely significant fact that private universities are not making it as either an extension and/or replacement of state or public universities? Yemi’s thesis, backed by Odia, Femi and Ogaga, is that no sooner do students flock to new private universities than they quickly discover that the “university” has no lecturers and professors for their courses, no facilities, equipment and services to augment or sustain their instruction and training and no general environment conducive to teaching, learning and research. There is more: salaries of faculty and staff are not be paid regularly; important or even major components of courses for graduation are left out completely; life for all students turn out to be very far from what they expected in their hopes and dreams for a modern university education, the kind their parents or grandparents had. And in the end, they leave, in an ironic version of the well-known electoral or protest tradition of “voting with the feet”.

    At this point in the discussion here, I should perhaps let it be known to the reader that I was and am not a keen supporter of private universities in Nigeria and, indeed, in the developing world. True, I am not as absolutely or irrevocably opposed to the idea as I was about a decade ago. But still, my view has always been and remains that in our country in particular and in the developing world more generally, at this stage of our encounter with modernity – both the one from other lands and the one that we create ourselves – education at all levels and especially at the tertiary level, should be the primary concern and obligation of the state, with private colleges and universities playing only a supplementary role to the primacy of public institutions. For this reason, it has been with great alarm, with even great despair that in the last two decades I have watched as private universities rapidly mushroomed, outnumbered government-funded universities and calamitously depressed the quality of the state or public institutions. If this is the case, do I therefore logically see Yemi’s declaration of the decline of private universities as good tidings?

    How I wish that things were that simple! Dear reader, wait until you read about Yemi’s further comments, further complications of the matter, greatly amplified by Femi, Odia and Ogaga. Here is Yemi’s “complication”: even as private universities are imploding and closing, the need for more universities, public and private, continues to rise exponentially. Yemi could not provide the statistics on the spot that night and neither can I do so now, about a week later, but it seems that far less than half of qualified applicants in our country would get admission if all the existing universities were filled to capacity. Thus, Yemi’s concern is: what happens to those millions of qualified applicants to universities and higher institutions for whom there are no places in the present (declining) number of institutions? Without in the least implying a disdain for the term, Yemi’s solution is “evolutionary” and it is this: the public, state-funded universities must have to become very creative in the matter of IGR – internally generated revenues. This would include fees and tuition increases, but not as the main sources. The main sources would be economic ventures and endowments into which would be built internal mechanisms to protect them those from hydra-headed banes of Nigerian capitalism – looting, waste and squandermania.

    Ogaga in particular, but Odia also, strongly suggested that ventures and enterprises that could or would create substantial IGR’s for public universities must follow the classic capitalist model of shareholder power and control to act as solid bulwarks against looting and waste. At that point, I felt as if I was back at Harvard – especially at the Harvard Business School – and was not in a starry night at the bucolic Pro-Chancellor’s Lodge at OAU-Ife! I even joked and teased Ogaga that ten years ago, I would have denounced him as a “capitalist lackey” for proposing share-market capitalism as the savior of the economic and institutional woes of our public universities. Ogaga laughed but wasn’t sure if my joke was playful or ideologically purist. At the time, I deliberately left him in the dark, but I can now assure him that I was being playful and not being ideologically inquisitorial. All the same, it was Femi that brought the conversation back or down to the level of basic issues of economic and social justice by posing a searing, poignant question: whether or not the universities have enough places for the millions of qualified students, where are the jobs for them, where is the employment for them when they do graduate from a university, any university, whether private or public?

    This question dramatically and precipitately brought the past of our group, the Ibadan-Ife Collective, to our present. But we had not met in more than two decades and a half; for a long time now, we have not had the kind of conversations, the kind of projects, the kinds of activism for which we were known then. This thought might have been behind a series of questions that I then posed in response to Femi’s question: Are the graduates we are producing now and that we will be producing in the future, are they being taught, being trained by academics and professionals who are themselves trained and good enough for a modern, technology and science driven capitalist economy? The private universities came and multiplied, beginning in the early 1980s and reaching a kind of preliminary high point in the first decade of the new century, but wasn’t their net effect on our universities as a whole a colossal deterioration of quality, standards and value? And which market-place of employment, capitalist or post-capitalist, can survive with this degree of devaluation of the quality of both the teacher and the student in higher education, together with the places of teaching and learning?

    I have said that Femi’s remark seemed to have brought our past as a group back into a dialogue with our present. I can now say that this was only momentarily. Femi’s question was too “big” for us and we couldn’t, didn’t take it up that night. And of course, neither did we take up my own expatiations of Femi’s question, leaving a hole, a gap in our conversation. In that lacuna, Yemi pressed ahead with carefully, perhaps even meticulously thought and planned scenarios for how and why our public, state-funded universities should embark on the pursuit of economic and financial solvency through ventures that will, finally, make IGR’s substantial enough for public and private universities to survive, to thrive. Perhaps he will prove his argument beyond any doubt or disputation by the success of his tenure as the Pro-Chancellor of the Governing Council of OAU-Ife. If his successes at other ventures provide us with a portent, then one must say that it is a good portent.

    1978, not 1984: an ironic erratum

    In last week’s column, I erroneously stated that Chinua Achebe was given the degree of D. Lit (Honoris Causa) at Ife and gave his famous Convocation Lecture, “The Truth of Fiction” in 1984 when, as a matter of fact, the events took place six years earlier, in 1978. Ah, the inscrutable ways of irony and negation! In the same column, I had drawn attention to the late Akin Isola “mistaken facts” in saying that he had come to Ife in 1974 to join his friends who, in fact and actuality, came to Ife after him. In other words, in the same article in which I was showing how Honestman misconstrued facts in the cause of larger truths, I was myself unknowingly doing exactly the same thing! 1978, not 1984! How did this error, this solecism come about? There is a small circumstantial explanation and it is this: before coming to Ife for the ceremonies, I had been told that I would not be speaking at all, that someone else would be giving the Convocation Lecture this year. This surprised me but any Nigerian who is surprised by surprise is not a true Nigerian! But then I arrived in Ife on Thursday and was then told that I would speaking after all – as I had previously expected. To make matters more fraught, I did not get the chance to begin thinking about and writing my acceptance speech until well past midnight on Thursday, finally going to bed around 4 a.m., all the while thinking of Femi (Osofisan) who was sleeping blissfully in the next bedroom! That, dear readers, is the context, the circumstance for the mistaken insertion of 1984 in place of 1978. If that satisfies you, I am pleased. But I must honestly admit that it doesn’t satisfy me. Why? Memory lapses have recently joined the list of my octogenarian ailments. Even if I had had a week to write that acceptance speech, I would probably still have written 1984, heavens help us!

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • And why are we so blessed? – the uneasy mix of grace and truth in friendship [For Femi Osofisan @ 70]

    And why are we so blessed? – the uneasy mix of grace and truth in friendship [For Femi Osofisan @ 70]

    Eni t’olorun o pa, eda to le paa ko si. FO t’olorun o pa, FO fun’ra e ko le paa! [S/he that has the protection of God, nobody can cause to die before his/her time. FO that has the protection of God, FO himself cannot kill before his allotted time!]
    The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk G.W. F. Hegel

    No, I have not suddenly become religious with the ripeness of age. The words in the first of the two epigraphs to this tribute come from an absolutely terrifying experience that I had in what I believe was the very last ride that I took with Femi Osofisan (FO) on a long journey in his car. The time was the early 1980s and we were travelling from Ile-Ife to Benin. For a long time after the start of the journey, I sat completely speechless as my friend broke all speeding records flying through space and time between 130 to 140 km per hour, absolutely without regard to whether or not we were travelling over smooth tar surfaces or broken, pitted patches of dirt road. When I could no longer take this experience in silent terror, I asked my friend in feigned nonchalance so he would not register my fear why he was speeding so recklessly. To my surprise, FO casually said, “you think all this time I haven’t noticed how tense, how fearful you have been? Relax, my friend!” Well, straight talk begets straight talk and so throwing all my pretended nonchalance to the winds, I answered back: “Relax? When you are going to get us killed?”

    After that journey, FO went on to have one more child – our Sisi. As a matter of fact, he went to achieve artistic and professional accomplishments that only few writers and academics ever achieve in the course of a lifetime: one of Africa’s preeminent playwrights and a dramatist whose plays are produced and studied in virtually all the continents of the world, both for the delight they give and the light they shed on the human condition in our continent and our world; more than 70 plays, novels, collections of poetry and essays; a much deserved reputation as one of our continent’s foremost theatre scholars, researchers and administrators; and the winner of the Thalia Prize for 2016, arguably the most prestigious prize for theatre scholarship, criticism and theory in the world.  Obviously then, we did not perish on that journey to Benin. But it was my last journey in a car driven by FO. For the truth is that, at least at that period in our lives, the man apparently felt in the bone marrow of his Being that he was indestructible! I have the testimonies of other friends and acquaintances to back me up on this idea. For after apparently having had the same kind of experience on long journeys with FO, such friends and acquaintances came to me pleading, “BJ, you are the only one he will listen to; he is going to kill himself and kill others with him as well!” To such people, I would give a forlorn answer, “you think I haven’t tried, you think I haven’t spoken with him on the matter time and time again? He thinks he is indestructible!”

    For those who might think that I am exaggerating, that I am blowing things out of proportion for rhetorical purposes in what is after all a tribute, let me say that I am in dead earnest in this matter of FO’s belief at that period of our early adulthood that a special grace from providence was looking out for him and protecting him from the perils of the road and of life itself. At least, that was what I thought initially. For instance, in this same period, in countless travels over all parts of Nigeria as ASUU National President, I survived only one horrible road crash. By contrast, FO survived at least half a dozen more horrific crashes! And what was truly amazing is that in every single instance, he escaped virtually unhurt. Why wouldn’t such a man come to feel that that he had a special access to the inscrutable benevolence of grace from the powers that govern the universe?

    But things were a little more complicated, as I eventually found out from the case of his and my confrontation with – high blood pressure! For it turned out that ore ofe, grace, had come to abide with FO not in a simple manner but complexly. Here, I must emphasize that I am publicly telling this particular anecdote for the first time ever in this tribute. This pertains to the time when the combination of our genes and our restless, manic lifestyles began to make us prone to hypertension. After an illness that nearly took me away, I began to very dutifully take my prescribed anti-hypertensive medications in order to stay alive. Again by contrast, for nearly a whole decade, FO completely ignored my desperate pleas with him to pay attention to his high blood pressure crisis. Whenever my endless pleas made him relent a bit, he would take his medications, but for a short period only after which he would discard the pills again with the absurd “explanation” that he could tell by intuition when the high BP was there and when it wasn’t there! On at least two occasions, one of them far away in Sri Lanka, he had violently explosive, migraine-like headaches that required emergency medical treatment. And still to my great despair, my friend remained incredibly nonchalant about his high BP crisis. It took me a long time to gradually fathom the cause of this sublime dalliance with early demise as a sort of semi-conscious fatalism. Both his father and his uncle had died in middle age and apparently, FO felt doomed by the law of genetic inheritance to have the same fate. But he did not have that fate and has lived beyond the age when his father and uncle departed by two decades – and still counting!

    I have gone into this lengthy narrative of that period of our young adulthood in order for me to say, quite simply but in great gratitude, that FO and I, we are extremely lucky to be alive today. By the law of averages and the logic of probability, we should have passed on decades ago. This “luck” that is of course more profoundly a matter of grace, is indeed generational. All of our great and dear friends and companions that are still alive today are also incredibly lucky – Kole Omotoso; Yemi Ogunbiyi; Eddie Madunagu; Odia Ofeimun; Ropo Sekoni; John Ohiorhenuan; Niyi Osundare; Niyi Aiyegbayo; Kunle Akanbi; Olu Ademulegun; Siji Adelugba; Tokunbo Dawodu; Olu Obafemi; Bode Lucas; Chima Anyadike and others. We have all lived far beyond our country’s life expectancy rate of 52 years. Moreover, for about half of the time that we have lived, some of us have lived as if we were wired to fulfill that national life expectancy rate of 52 years! We were of course not indestructible; we were only lucky. We were and are the beneficiaries of a grace that we not only did not earn but actually did everything not to deserve.

    Here, Hegel’s famous words, as expressed in the second epigraph to this tribute, come to mind. By the owl of Minerva that only spreads its wings and flies at the end of the day, Hegel metaphorically asserts that unhappily, wisdom and insight come to most women and men at the twilight of their lives, too late to have had the chance to shape and transform the course taken by their lives. But going against the grain of Hegel’s thought, I say that if you are still alive if and when wisdom and insight at last come to you, then all is not lost. I’d like to express this idea both playfully and in all seriousness: failing to perish on the roads in the 70s, 80s and early 90s as much as he tried to, FO began to drive carefully by the middle of the 1990s! Similarly, all of us who have lived past that putative, statistical national endpoint of 52 years, from the chastened experience of our years and decades of recklessness and daring, we have much in knowledge and fortifications of the will to leave to those who will come after us!

    The ultimate mark of grace is of course the gift of life itself. Not bare, exigent life but life lived in dignity, unburdened by the terrible scourges of poverty, insecurity and abuse by the rich, the powerful, the enemies of all the values that sustain and enrich human life. Bearing in mind all these caveats to the celebration of life itself as a mark of grace, I am immensely grateful for the life of my friend, FO. I say this because it is through his life and the lives of two or three other friends that I came to understand that friendship is a great gift, one of the most precious manifestations of grace that we have as human beings. Blessed immeasurably by the friendships of FO and these other few friends, I have often wondered: Why am I personally and all of us collectively so blessed in and through our friendships?

    Grace is of course a part of the answer to this question: in a country and a continent where lack of the simplest but most basic necessities of life is so deep and widespread, we have been lucky, we have been blessed not to be among the ranks of the wretched, the forgotten, the betrayed. But truth is also a part of the answer to the question, perhaps even more portentously so than grace. For FO and I and all these other friends, we have never hidden truth from ourselves, most of all the truth of our divergent and often conflicting perceptions of what needs to be done to extend the “blessings” of our own personal and professional successes to the underprivileged of our society and our common earth. Indeed, of all my friends, FO perhaps stands alone in this fact that he and I are keenly and deeply aware of the truths of where we agree and where we differ on what needs to be done to extend our own “blessings” to all of our peoples and all of the denizens of our planetary home. Here is another way of putting across what I am trying to say here about truth and friendship or more properly, truth in friendship: a true friend is one whom you love and trust so completely that you are sure that everything you have, including your life, is safe with him or her; on another level, a true friend is she or him from whom you never hide the crucial things about which you do not see eye to eye, things indeed on which you may have conflicting differences. Of all my friends living and departed, FO stands alone as the one with whom there is a near perfect balance of these two dimensions of the close, intimate and very uneasy relationship between truth and friendship.

    The grace and the truth, they walk together in a friendship that has been one of the most treasured things in my life. So, okunrin ogun, cherished husband, father, grandfather, sibling, cousin and friend to so many to whom your life has been a rich harvest of blessings, take this salute of your friend (and elder!) as I bid you welcome to our midst, those of us who did not die young and hope to live the rest of our days in a land, a world where the blessings will spread all around, boundlessly and bountifully.

    Ire o! Ire aiku ti se baale oro!

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                           bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • A generous, joyous and romantic eccentricity at the molten core of theatre and life

    A generous, joyous and romantic eccentricity at the molten core of theatre and life

    (For Dapo Adelugba, 1939-2014: egbon, teacher and mentor)

    WHEN the text message came to me from Femi Osofisan informing me that we had lost him, I screamed back a response that carried the full weight of the devastating shock that I felt: : “WHEN and HOW did he die?” Femi replied simply: “check your email”. And I did and found not one, but two emails. One was from Siji, the late Emeritus Professor’s brother and a friend of more than half a century; his email stoically accepted the inevitable and gave thanks for a life that had been prodigious in service to the nation and humanity. The other email was from Jahman Anikulapo that had been forwarded to me by Femi himself; this email hinted at a death that could easily have been avoided by observance of the most elementary protocols of professionalism in medical practice in our country. I think I shall always and forever be caught between the inscriptions in these two emails. One: “gbese ni’ku; ko s’eni ti ko ni lo” (“death is a debt that we all owe and none shall leave this life alive”). Two: the terribly and monstrously backward state of medical practice in Nigeria has itself become the bedrock of the banal “inevitability” of death in our country. In many other parts of the contemporary world, while death’s “inevitability” has not been obliterated, it has been enormously constrained, almost to the point of redundancy.

    The bitterness of these opening observations in this tribute has a very concrete and particular basis. Sometime late last year, I had had a series of conversations with Siji and Femi and others on how we might all work together to smoothen the relocation of Professor Adelugba to Ibadan. He had finally “retired” from his post-retirement contract with Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria. For a while he had stayed on in Zaria but had then moved to Lagos. But anyone who knows the slightest thing about him knows that Ibadan is his spiritual home. And it is the one place that has the largest concentration of those with whom he had experienced the happiest, most memorable and productive years of his professional and personal life. At any rate, it was with a great, optimistic expectation that I “conspired” with others late last year to welcome “Uncle D” back to Ibadan. I looked forward to resuming old, unfinished discussions with him; and I was excited by anticipation of new topics of discourse that we would almost certainly engage in. As recently as last week as I began to prepare for my annual seven-week visit home every December, this long-awaited anticipation of linking up again with “Uncle D” was high on the list of pleasures that my visit home would yield. This is the emotional context for that response that I screamed back to Femi when I received his email informing me of Professor Adelugba’s death: “WHEN and HOW did he die?”

    In the death of Dapo Adelugba, the world of the arts, the humanities and, especially theatre in academia in our country and in Africa has lost one of its legendary pioneering figures. Absolutely, he was one of a kind. He was loved, he was revered by generations of his students with something approaching hero-worship. To those who were never directly his students, this always seemed mysterious. But nothing was as free of mystery as the foundation of the worshipful devotion of Uncle D’s hundreds, maybe thousands of students. For the simple but profoundly moving thing about this assertion is the fact that Adelugba made every single one of his students feel that she or he was important, was special. He gave equal attention, equal time and energy to every single student. Every paper that was ever written and submitted to him was read and graded with great care; and he made detailed commentary on every single paper submitted to him. As if that was not enough, he made himself available to every single student who wanted a personal one-on-one follow-up on top of the copious comments that he’d made on a paper. I testify that as a teacher myself, I have never met any teacher, any colleague that equaled Uncle D on this particular point.

    Indeed, when I was one of his undergraduate students in the late 1960s, I often marveled at this generosity that in my personal experience was unequalled. Typically, we were relatively few in our classes at that period of the history of higher education in Nigeria. For instance, in one of the most formative classes that I took with him which was on dramatic criticism, there were only about eight of us in the class. Imagine my surprise then when many decades later I read glowing testimonies affirming this same generosity from Adelugba’s students from another period when class size had more than quadrupled beyond what we were used to in my time at U.I. Only a tiny minority of the most conscientious teachers ever aspires to reach every single one of their students; far more remarkable is the fact that among this order of the elect among teachers, it is very rare to have what it takes to fulfill that noble aspiration. Uncle D was a scion of this order of the elect among teachers. He gave an unquantifiably large chunk of his life to his students. Since he was only human, this took a great toll on him, but this is not the occasion to dwell on this particular matter.

    Adelugba was of course not a saintly mentor who suffered fools and slackers among his students silently; he was not a guru presiding over an ashram of god-obsessed neophytes. He was a workaholic teacher and mentor who demanded from his students what he demanded of himself. He was quick to anger and he tended to express this anger tempestuously. Quite often, the cause of the anger was, to the offender, so slight, so inscrutable as to be quixotic. This was perhaps the basis of a reputation that over time he garnered as the chief exemplar of a defining eccentricity among U.I. Theatre Department professors and lecturers! But since he was the very embodiment of generosity, since he had a laughter that was unique in its affability and emotional resonance, no professor’s or lecturer’s “eccentricity” was more tolerable – and tolerated – than his.

    The vocation of teaching is of course not a contentless abstraction; as a teacher you school, you mentor students in a particular subject, a particular academic discipline: Physics or Chemistry; Mathematics or Sociology; History or Geography. In the case of drama, theatre and the arts as a composite academic discipline and practice in our country, it was part of his destiny that Adelugba shared the pioneering spotlight with other legendary figures like Geoff Axworthy, Wole Soyinka, Joel Adedeji, Demas Nwoko, Dexter Lyndersay and Ola Rotimi. These men – among whom only Soyinka and Nwoko are still with us – were/are all without exception endowed with great talent and equally great egos. I make this assertion absolutely without any sarcasm, any irony, any criticism. It is in the very nature of pioneers in all fields of endeavor to be driven, to be single-minded, to be eccentric. To this, add the significant fact that in the period when drama and theatre were being established as a composite academic discipline at U.I., there was very little sympathy, talk less of understanding among the powers that be in the academic pecking order of the university. Many of the most eminent and powerful professors at the time could not bring themselves to understand and lend their support to the move to transform the old School of Drama to a Department of Theatre Arts. Even when the transition eventually took place, the old antagonism, the old philistine condescension towards the arts and theatre persisted. With his own peculiar brand of “eccentricity” that I am calling generous, joyous and romantic in this piece, Adelugba played one of the most central roles in these pioneering efforts to provide a valid and respected place for theatre and drama in the curriculum of Nigerian universities. What exactly does this assertion entail?

    With the possible exception of Soyinka, Adelugba was the most self-assured in his knowledge of, and immersion in local and international currents of the world’s drama, theatre and the arts. He came to the profession of academic teaching with legendary feats as an actor and theatre director in his student days at the old U.C.I. and his teaching stint at the Ibadan Grammar School. As “Suberu” in That Scoundrel Suberu that he adapted from one of Moliere’s plays, as Murano in The Road, as Dawodu in Kongi’s Harvest, and as Old Man in Madmen and Specialists (my favorite among the many roles that he performed in Soyinka’s plays) he had regaled hundreds of secondary school and university students as the country’s uncontested leading actor in the then newly emergent Nigerian drama and theatre in English. As a theatre director whose charisma and enthusiasm were unparalleled, he gave much joy and enrichment to his actors and technical crew. As the School of Drama was transforming into the Department of Theatre Arts, he was the chief pedagogue of the central disciplines of acting and directing. More than perhaps any other person, he produced the largest crop of the most talented younger generation of theatre directors in the country. The times that I spent as an actor in his productions were unquestionably some of the happiest times in my undergraduate years at U.I. I know for a fact that most of my classmates who were in his productions felt the same way. And in his classes, we encountered texts of dramatic literature and criticism from virtually all the regions of the world that went far beyond the narrow British focus of the authors and texts that I encountered in my major in the English Department. In short and to summarize the essential point that I am making here, in Adelugba Nigeria’s and Africa’s pioneering theatre department found one of its most cosmopolitan, charismatic and self-assured voices in its hard fought struggle for legitimacy.

    For good or ill, it also came to pass that Adelugba outstayed all the other pioneers of the great project of making drama and theatre a valid and respected discipline in Nigerian universities. Long after either death or other interests had diverted his fellow pioneers away from academia, he stayed on. He was thus the longest serving senior academic teacher and administrator of drama and theatre in our country. Today, his protégés constitute the single most pervasive and influential bloc of senior academics in theatre departments in universities in Nigeria and across the African continent. This is a monumental achievement. But it is not without its ambiguities.

    I do not claim to fully comprehend exactly what happened but it seems that after legitimacy was won, after most of his fellow pioneers had departed, Adelugba turned his attention to mass production of Ph Ds, apparently as part of U.I.’s  self-reinvention as primarily a research rather than a teaching university. With this paradigm shift, the U.I. Graduate School became big and the mass production of the next generation of Nigeria’s professoriate began in earnest. I am told that no department in the University has been more eager in fulfilling this new mission than the Theatre Arts Department and no professor in the entire University has produced more Ph Ds than Adelugba.

    It is too soon to produce a final verdict on this particular aspect of Adelugba’s rich legacy. That will come long after all of us are gone. I sincerely hope that when that verdict comes, it will be kinder to his memory than the toll that the effort exacted on his life in the last two to three decades. Conscientious and generous to the last, as he mass produced these Ph Ds, he lived virtually in his office, poring over overlong tomes of doctoral dissertation. It was very injurious to his health. And he became reclusive, very reclusive. When he was still in Ibadan before relocating to Zaria, I sometimes visited him at his house on campus. For the most part the conversations went well on these visits. But it was his laughter that I always looked forward to and always cherished the most during the visits. In my experience, the only other person who had laughter to match his was the late Agbo Folarin. Adelugba’s laughter was fulsome, it came in gales or waves of a pure release of mirth that crested in an expressive summit at which, in my imagination, Adelugba could see all of life’s absurdities, challenges and promises with equanimity. But instead of ending on that summit, the laughter would start anew in gales and waves that would crest in still other summits, on and on and on. I can think of no better image for his life and career. He is gone now. But he was here, he was here.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • What is Boko Haram?

    What is Boko Haram?

    This is not a good time to be an expatriate Nigerian.

    No, I take that back; this is a particularly bad time to be an expatriate Nigerian, given the steady flow of bad news, bad news and more bad news out of the country. Even the rebasing that has catapulted Nigeria from the doldrums to the world’s 26th largest economy overnight has not translated into equanimity for the expatriate Nigerian.

    Our political and diplomatic strategists will have to take a cue from the economic strategists to rebase the national image.

    The latter drew on Nigeria’s burgeoning home video industry Nollywood to boost the Gross Domestic Product by a full percentage point and some. The former will have to factor in Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, JP Clarke, Christopher Okigbo, Niyi Osundare, Femi Osofisan, John Cardinal Onaiyekan, the Super Eagles, Ben Nwabueze, Kenneth Dike, JF Ade Ajayi, Claude Ake, Yusuf Grillo, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Demas Nwoko. Simeon Adebo, Jerome Udoji, Peter Lassa, Ali Akilu, Afigbo Adiele, Bala Usman, Gani Fawehinmi, Ben Enwonwu, the Brothers Ransome-Kuti, Abubakar Imam, Ayodele Awojobi, DO Fagunwa,Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Cyprian Ekwensi, Mokwugo Okoye, Jelani Aliyu, and others too numerous to list, in rebasing the national image.

    Surely, the country that produced these luminaries and others too numerous to name here deserves a better appellation than the land of Boko Haram and rampaging “Fulani herdsmen.” “Rebranding” was the name Dr Dora Akunyili’s gave this heroic but ultimately futile undertaking when she was Minister of Information. That was then.

    Now, in keeping with the times, the effort will have to be re-launched, the goal being to rebase Nigeria’s foreign image, the image that follows them wherever they go, defines them and often haunts them, an image they can never shed nor escape from.

    Their green passports or the line in their foreign passports naming Nigeria as their country of birth literally proclaims that image at foreign ports, assuming they survive the indignities that come with applying for a travel visa. From then on, the passport holder is put through the formidable challenge of proving that he or she is not guilty of the crimes and misdemeanours now associated with being a Nigerian.

    To this discomfiting experience we must now add the prospect of being regarded as a national of a country infested by terrorism, and of quite possibly being perceived as a covert sympathiser or enabler of bomb-throwing Islamists and throat-cutting “Fulani herdsmen” or a close relation of theirs.

    Each time I enter the coffee room or a class, I hold my breath, hoping fervently that my faculty colleagues and students will not bring up the latest bulletin on Boko Haram’s and Fulani herdsmen’s running orgy of bestial violence, however obliquely.

    Even the most basic question on the matter would stump me, namely, what is Boko Haram?

    More than three years after Boko Haram hit the front pages and the headlines, I still cannot claim with confidence that I know what it is. If pressed on the matter, I can only say that it is a malignant, nihilistic affliction on the body politic. But that is describing the manifestation rather than defining the essence.

    Only its masterminds and its denizens know what Boko Haram is. The security agencies do not know, and neither does President Goodluck Jonathan. He is on record as having admitted that much and adding, as if to deepen the mystery, that for all he knew, some members of his cabinet and advisers who met and dined and wined with him every day could well be members of Boko Haram.

    Whatever Boko Haram may be, it is not a monolith as is generally supposed, according to a source I cannot identify. There is the political Boko Haram, which carries out large-scale operations like blowing up churches and motor parks and police stations and prisons and other public facilities – the one whose masked operatives toting Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades race in Hillux vans through desert shrubbery to distant outposts, their grisly errands to perform.

    Then there is the mafia-like Boko Haram, which specialises in criminal extortion and is not above being hired by aggrieved persons to settle scores. If the twain are related, it is not clear what the relationship consists in, my source tells me.

    In the North, nobody talks about the one or the other, for fear of murderous reprisal. It is as if the subject is haram, forbidden. The fear of Boko Haram is the beginning of wisdom – and survival.

    If I don’t know what Boko Haram is, I can hardly be expected to know what it wants. I don’t. Nobody knows for sure what Boko Haram wants. Is their goal the islamisation of Nigeria through terror, as some commentators have claimed? If that is the case, why is it that they do not spare fellow Muslims in their murderous rampage?

    Is it to make Nigeria ungovernable? They certainly have made a swathe of North-eastern Nigeria ungovernable, but reducing the entire country to that condition seems a goal too far. Even if that goal is attainable, what purpose would it serve?

    To provoke the military into taking over, perhaps, and thus terminate Dr Jonathan’s effete administration?

    Which military? The one that can’t even protect its own facilities and personnel against the insurgents? The one that claimed to have rescued more than 100 girls abducted by Boko Haram from a secondary school in Chibok, Borno State, only to declare without fear and without shame when it was challenged that it had been “misled”?

    “Misled” by whom? On how many other crucial issues has it been “misled,” and with what consequences?

    The military in which a unit can be suborned by a junior cabinet minister, a minor politician with no following, to halt by force of arms a housing construction project being lawfully undertaken by the government of his state, and in which the same minister can deploy soldiers to subvert the electoral process in another state?

    Again, if pressed by those seeking to learn more about the phenomenon known as Boko Haram, I cannot explain why none of its stalwarts has been brought to justice. At the scene of every Boko Haram outrage, President Jonathan vows solemnly that the perpetrators would not go unpunished. The next week brings another outrage, which draws another solemn vow from the President. And then the next.

    Nor can I explain why President Jonathan, the nation’s comforter-in-chief, headed to Kano while the public was still trying to grasp the full measure of the carnage at Nyanya Motor Park in Abuja for a ceremony to welcome a defector back to the PDP.

    Since this was a party affair, could it not have been postponed as a mark of respect to those who were still counting the dead? If the rally must hold, could the PDP national chair not have been dispatched as the featured guest?

    Did he have to trade abuse on the occasion with Kano State Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso who belongs in the political opposition? Such pusillanimity, it is necessary to insist, ill becomes the person and the office of the President. Entertaining the party faithful to a jig while Nyanya was still smouldering made Dr Jonathan come across as unfeeling.

    Even his trip to Ibadan the same day to attend ceremonies marking the Olubadan’s 100th birthday was at bottom a re-election ploy inexcusable under the circumstances.

    If Dr Jonathan cannot rise to the high office of President of the Republic, must he cut it down to fit his own modest profile?