Professor Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi, dean of Nigerian historians and a scholar of global stature died last week, some three months after his family, friends and associates staged two days of events in Ibadan to mark his 85thbirthday and celebrate his monumental accomplishments.
I count it one of the greatest honours I have ever received to have been asked to deliver the Birthday Lecture on the second day of the festivities, May 26, which was Ade Ajayi’s birthday. As it turned out, that was his last public outing.
This is like a death in the family, and I thank all those who have sent me messages of condolence on the passing of the great man.
Many have also asked me about his condition on that day. He was frail, as was to be expected of any person well into the eighth decade of life. But he was for the most part alert, animated even. When he seemed disengaged, it was hard to tell whether it was because he was bored or simply bemused, this man of few words, and withal not given to ceremony.
His autograph on my copy of the book presented on the occasion, “J.F. Ade Ajayi: His Life and Career,” edited by Professor Michael Omolewa and our own Professor Akinjide Osuntokun, and with a Foreword by General Yakubu Gowon, reveals a man in full command of his mental and physical faculties.
Rendered in his crisp handwriting, with all letters well formed and no tell-tale signs of a quaking hand, it is something I will treasure to the end of my days.
It reads: “To Prof Olatunji Dare, with thanks for a well-delivered and thought-provoking lecture at the presentation of this book.”
Today, I have chosen to pivot on a piece I wrote back when he delivered a Valedictory Address to mark his retirement from the University of Ibadan to pay my tribute to his memory. It was titled “A scholar at work” (The Guardian, December 12, 1989).
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Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi’s Valedictory Lecture at the University of Ibadan is sure to go down as one of the high points of Nigeria’s intellectual history. It was a fitting climax to 31 years of teaching and research at his alma mater, 26 of them as a professor of History. The wide sweep of his scholarship was manifest in every paragraph; so was the depth, the profundity of his insights.
No less evident were his intellectual humility, his modesty of exposition, his generosity of mind toward colleagues, students and even those who had sought to humiliate him, his concern for the nation and for the system he was leaving, as well as his devotion to his family.
The preface to this remarkable lecture was itself another classic: A perceptive essay on the man and his works by Obaro Ikime, one of six students to have earned national and international reputations of their own as professors out of the 24 Ade Ajayi taught in his first year at Ibadan. Few teachers could have asked for more. Something tells me that he will treasure this tribute almost as much he cherishes the National Merit Award.
Ade Ajayi, like Kenneth Dike before him, gave legitimacy and direction to African historiography. European scholars like Hegel, Arnold Toynbee and Hugh Trevor-Roper held that Africa had no history whatever. Trevor-Roper for one insisted that history was about light and that since Africa was all darkness, it could not possibly have a history.
Lost on him and his fellow intellectual chauvinists was the fact that a certain age of European existence characterised as the Dark Ages was nevertheless considered worthy of scholarly study.
Ajayi is a leading light among those distinguished Nigerians, African and other Third World scholars and some progressive Europeans (Basil Davison and Michael Crowder are worthy of special mention) who, through diligent research and scholarship, changed all that. His scholarly output of more than 60 publications, with at least 11 more in the works on the eve of his retirement, is formidable by any standard; in a country where a scholar has to contend with bureaucratic distractions and material deprivations, it is truly awesome.
And he is not even through yet. For as Ikime made clear, Ajayi may retire from teaching but he cannot retire from History.
In the tradition of Jakob Buckhardt, Ade Ajayi’s point of departure would seem to be that history is not just a narrow specialisation to be studied and written for its own sake. It is not even merely a search for truth. The truths history reveals must be spoken to power, not in the spirit of confrontation, not to make the writer clever for a moment, but to make society wiser.
It is in this spirit that Ade Ajayi has turned his prodigious scholarship on the processes and problems of national integration, education, public policy and administration, analysing, clarifying and illuminating issues and pointing the way forward
But he is not like the direction post that is always pointing out the way but never going there. The bureaucratic stability that the University of Lagos enjoys today is in large measure his handiwork. When he arrived on the scene in 1972, he found that the place had been carved up into fiefdoms, to satisfy all kinds of interest.
To cite just one example, there was an Institute of Computer Science which had no regular students but ran service courses from time to time. But it was a full-fledged faculty with a teaching staff of two, of whom one was the dean. The traditional Faculty of Science was split into a School of Biological Sciences and a School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, each with its own dean.
In his first year, Ade Ajayi rationalised this profusion of faculties and deanships and created a leaner, more responsive, administrative structure.
He also embarked on a vigorous staff development programme, under which graduates of the university were sent abroad to acquire advanced degrees and return to take up teaching positions. Before Ade Ajayi, the university undertook to pay only one-half of the salary of members of staff training abroad, plus passage and tuition. Most of those who trained under that scheme did not return, and the programme was more or less a disinvestment.
Ade Ajayi moved quickly to correct this half-hearted attempt at staff development. Under the new programme, staff members going on study leave abroad would receive their full salary, half of it in foreign exchange. The university would pay the full tuition as well as maintenance allowance for their families. And all this was without prejudice to any other financial support the staff member may get elsewhere.
Virtually every beneficiary of the scheme returned. Without it, the faculty strength of the University of Lagos would not have been what it was before SAP and other forms of attrition led to a steady movement away from the system.
Although Ade Ajayi’s second term as vice chancellor was brusquely and unfairly terminated, he did not touch on it his valedictory. Instead he called attention to the humiliation of Professor Orishejolomi Thomas, former vice chancellor of the University of Ibadan.
Thomas, distinguished surgeon, one of the first group of Africans to become Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, founding provost of the University of Lagos College of Medicine, had just finished presiding over the Convocation of the University of Ibadan when he learned on the evening news that he had been retired with immediate effect.
Speculations were rife that his dismissal might have arisen from a court ruling in which he was purportedly rebuked for improper administration of an estate of which he was an executor. Those who knew him said such conduct would be totally out of character (Interpolation: Years later, he was vindicated on appeal).
Shattered, Thomas retreated to his prosperous rubber estate in Warri. Years later, he took ill. His family planned to fly him abroad for treatment. He would hear none of it. He said he should be taken to the University of Lagos Teaching Hospital that he had founded back in 1962. If he could not be healed there, he would like to die there. And it was there he died. Such was his faith in that institution, in his colleagues, and in his country.
It was ennobling in Ade Ajayi to do justice to the memory of this great Nigerian patriot.
In today’s world so dependent on new ideas and creative thinking and on changing technology as a means of mastering nature, Ade Ajayi deposed in his valedictory, no society can continue to alienate, vilify and marginalise its intellectual community and hope to develop.
This is the warning of a wise man, a distillation of the lessons of history.
But were they listening?
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It remains to ask, today, 35 years later: Are they listening?
