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Tag: JeyiFo

  • Buhari urges academics to tackle Nigeria’s challenges as OAU honours Jeyifo

    PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari has urged the academics to focus their researches in solving the country’s challenges.

    Buhari spoke at the weekend at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife’s convocation for 2015/2016 and 2016/2017 sets of graduands.

    It was a day renowned literary giant and scholar, Prof. Biodun Jeyifo, was honored by the university with honorary Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.)

    The university’s Vice Chancellor, Prof. Eyitope Ogunbodede, said Jeyifo had registered a permanent presence in the global arena of literary criticism, social activism and public discourse.

    According to Prof. Ogunbodede, Jeyifo’s works have impacted positively on the study of African Literature as well as related field such as Theatre, Film, Africana Studies, African-American cultural studies and post-colonial studies.

    However, Buhari lamented that the society had been confronted with unprecedented problems, challenging  the academics to lead in finding solutions to them.

    The President, who was represented by the National Universities Commission (NUC) Executive Secretary Dr. Sulaiman Yussuf,  said: “We should put our academics to task by challenging them to come up with solutions to the  myriad of problems confronting our country in particular and the African country in general.”

    He expressed worries that most Nigerian academics use their intellect to develop foreign countries at the expense of Nigeria, where they obtained education, leaving the problems facing their own country to persist.

    Buhari added: “Most academics of Nigerian origin have been harnessing their intellectual capabilities, prowess and talents to further develop foreign countries, where they reside at the expense of their native county. More surprising is the fact that these are Nigerians who acquired their degrees, certificates or diplomas from institutions of higher learning here in Nigeria.

    “It is unfortunate that most of the outcomes of numerous researches and papers presented by our scholars at national and international conferences usually end up on the shelves of their respective authors,  supervisors, departmental or faculty libraries and other university archives.”

    He reiterated commitment to supporting education for optimal development through adequate funding and motivation of staff with improved welfare.

    Buhari, who promised to use what he described as meagre resources to put an end to the agitation and incessant strikes embarked upon by the unions, called on the university management to come up with recommendations, targeted research, policy briefs “and any other thing that you think will assure us that our funding of education is not a wasteful venture.”

    The university’s chancellor, Etsu Nupe, Alhaji Yahaya Abubakar, appealed to the institution’s personnel not to use industrial action as an option to press home their demands for welfare and other demands from government.

    The monarch, who advised them to embrace dialogue and negotiation at all times, called on the graduating students to apply the knowledge they had acquired to strive for and promote positive change and excellence in their various states and across the globe.

    The vice chancellor expressed zero-tolerance for defiant behaviours such as cultism, violence and sexual harassment.

    Prof. Ogunbodede added that 13,809 students covering the 2015/2016 and 2016/2017 academic sessions graduated at the event and they were awarded diplomas, first degrees, masters of philosophy and doctors of philosophy degrees.

  • Biodun Jeyifo at 70: His person, prowess, push for freedom

    Biodun Jeyifo at 70: His person, prowess, push for freedom

    It is Thursday, 21st January, 2016. Fine weather; sunny morning. Students, in droves, are seen all over the scenic campus of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. The area around the university’s Conference Centre remains relatively quiet, even as it plays host to a great man: a Nigerian citizen and a Harvard academic.

    As an attendee who is unfamiliar with the person of the man being celebrated, you may expect me to see a huge, imposing academic. But on the contrary, this tall, balding figure’s fitness belies his now seventy-year-old body, profundity of his erudition and intellect and the irrepressible passion of his spirit. This is Biodun Jeyifo, born on 5th January, 1946; a man who is in his tenth year as Professor of African and American Studies and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

    So what might this occasion be, in which BJ, as Biodun Jeyifo is popularly called, is the cynosure?

    Giving his remarks, Professor Gbemisola Adeoti, Dean of Faculty of Arts, OAU, terms it “an important gathering of the tribes [in honour of] an illustrious ancestor.” Tagged ‘Biodun Jeyifo @ 70 Conference’, it is Biodun Jeyifo’s birthday anniversary, a rally against political corruption and an academic summit all rolled up into a two-day event. It is, as Professor Adeoti says, organised in honour of Professor Jeyifo’s life as a social critic, one-time president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) a believer in collective struggle, and (for some) at once a struggling playwright and an accomplished critic. “The name BJ registers a dedicated teacher of literature and a combative literary critic of Marxist ideological persuasion,” he says.

    Biodun Jeyifo is a man conceived as a World War was winding down and born a few months after that colossal conflict’s abrupt end. He knows the price of freedom: blood, toil, tears, sweat; supreme commitment to its cause. He knows the sound of the cries for freedom, and has responded by making the much-anticipated ultimate promise, ‘I am coming home soon.’ Karl Marx himself, for all the frailties of his theories, will be proud of this believer in him, who though lectures at one of the world’s greatest universities, wastes no time in frankly saying by way of an aside that ‘Harvard is a snotty place’ and that he tells his students there that Harvard does not come close to providing the sort of intellectualism and activism he took from OAU and other Nigerian universities.

    You get the hint that Jeyifo has once belonged to OAU when you hear Professor Charles Taiwo Akanbi, representing the OAU Vice-Chancellor, Professor Bamitale Omole, say, “For us at [OAU], Professor Jeyifo is our pride. … It behoves us all to gather here and celebrate one of our own, especially as we are honoured to have him in flesh and blood. Therefore, on behalf of all of you here, especially the Great Ife Community, I say to Professor Biodun Jeyifo: Welcome back home.”

    Jeyifo had an eleven-year stint as a lecturer in the Department of Literature-in-English at OAU from 1976 to 1987, within which period he was elected President of ASUU.

    Professor Akanbi goes on to deliver the Vice-Chancellor’s praise of Jeyifo: “BJ stands tall as a polemicist, literary scholar, and a celebrated public intellectual…. Apart from his Spartan lifestyle, he believes very much in the supremacy of ideas as the foundation for social upliftment. Without doubt, we owe the vibrancy of the intellectual struggle of [ASUU] to Professor Jeyifo and his colleagues. As foundation president of ASUU, BJ raised the standard of unionism in the ivory tower.”

    On Jeyifo’s work as a critic of Wole Soyinka, Professor Akanbi, alluding to the Bible, declares, “it certainly takes the deep to call to the deep,” which is evident in Jeyifo’s long standing mentee-mentor relationship with the personality and works of Soyinka himself. And Jeyifo has written or edited such works as Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (1988), Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity (2001), Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Post colonialism (2004). Professor Akanbi wraps up the VC’s Address with a call to present “no better birthday gift than a renewed commitment to the original ideals of ASUU to ‘BJ, the irrepressible spirit and motivator of the Talakawa philosophy.”

    How does the Vice-Chancellor perceive the ‘BJ @ 70’ celebration?

    ‘BJ at 70’, he says, “is a chance for stocktaking and sober reflection.” This is an understanding echoed in the keynote of Professor Attahiru Jega, the erstwhile Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) titled, ‘The Complexity of Freedom: The Left and the Struggle for Socio-political Transformation in Nigeria’. Revealing that he first met the celebrant in 1986, at that year’s ASUU Delegates Conference, Professor Jega recalls, “Biodun Jeyifo’s calm and cool demeanour in presiding over that [Left Caucus] meeting, with his apt summary of issues discussed and astute and commendable effort at consensus building.”

    While confessing that Jeyifo’s departure for the USA in 1987 to take up professorship at Oberlin College left him and his colleagues disappointed “because we believed there was a lot his presence would have offered the struggle,” Professor Jega declares that he has “remained inspired by his example; his passion for radical and humane scholarship, his combatant intellectualism and his popular engagement with the struggle for a better Nigeria, reflected in interviews and contributions to newspapers and other media. As a reputable literary critic … in his sojourn abroad, he has become a great symbol of credible Nigerian intellectuals who have made us proud by their accomplishments and intellectual contributions, which have profound impact globally.”

    How does the Keynote speaker and political science don view freedom? Acknowledging that his duties as INEC Chairman and the many challenges that came with that responsibility may have blunted his academic edge, making him slightly ill-prepared to deliver the archetypal keynote address, Jega sees freedom first “as a universal right, as in the freedom of thought, of expression (i.e. academic freedom) and religion,” which he says “is not only desirable but is also worthy of struggles to protect, defend and expand…”

    He believes that the struggles for freedom must be based on “recognition of the complexity of the contemporary world, as well as the complexity of freedom,” a complexity that, rather than try to run away from, we must “strive to understand…, and to design methodologies and strategies to effectively operate within it.”

    What does he see as the greatest challenge the left (the radical intellectual movement for the expansion of freedom) is facing in Nigeria? “We have succumbed to the many divides so much so that most of the bridges built in the past have been dismantled.” The solution? “We need to rebuild these bridges and strengthen linkages with progressive forces across the country…we must link town and gown… we need to rethink strategies,” he says, adding that there are methodologies more relevant to us than the approaches of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara—widely romanticised approaches which, though useful in Cuba, may not be directly useful or helpful to the cause of the intellectual left. He gives a rallying cry: “Organise, don’t agonise!”

    Ably chairing this conference and celebration which has brought together guests from around the world—including such household names as Dr. Dipo Fasina, Ogaga Ifowodo, Odia Ofeimun, Professors Femi Osofisan, Kunle Omotoso, and Abdullahi Sule-Kano, and indeed, Governor Rauf Aregbesola of the State of Osun—is Barrister Femi Falana, who holds everyone spellbound with his denunciation of hypocrisy and selective justice in Nigerian politics and the euphemisation of crimes within the Nigerian political and legal systems. He praises Jeyifo as “one of the young lecturers who introduced me to the Marxist worldview, without which my education would have been incomplete” and says the event is in celebration of “your idea, your integrity, your commitment, your consistency.”

  • Celebrating Biodun Jeyifo at 70

    Celebrating Biodun Jeyifo at 70

    The eminent stars in the firmament of literature shone at their brightest last Tuesday to celebrate one of their accomplished kindred spirits –an iconic teacher, an excellent researcher, and a social/literary critic of towering relevance–BiodunJeyifo who gracefully slipped into the igloo of septuagenarians.

    It was a moving fiesta of the literati, arty-farty minds, friends and well-wishers. They had come to identify with and celebrate Jeyifo’s many remarkable years of profound intellectual commitment, activism for a just society, and commitment to the cause of the hoi polloi. The mind behind the Talakawa Liberation Herald with The Nation on Sunday was evidently in high spirit as the gathering showered encomiums on him.A profoundly productive scholar and critic, Jeyifo has more than 50 professional publications and still continuously deploys the rich resources of his mind as a Professor of African and African-American Studies and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, United States of America.

    I can confidently report that it is with such events as the lecture of Prof. BiodunJeyifo @ 70 that enduring memories are made. I can also competently confirm to you that literary events in Nigeria is not a gathering for loose minds, the frivolously epicurean minds – hence the leanness of the audience. At the event that Tuesday, the audience was slim. The students who often populate such gatherings because they are coerced were happily absent. But what is interesting about the slimness of the audience is that it had immeasurable quality – evidently star-studded. The creme de la creme of Nigerian/world literature gave sense, rhyme, rhythm, and meaning to the event.

    Emeritus Professor J. P. Clark was on hand to inimitably chair the unforgettable literary soiree, Noble Laureate WoleSoyinka was uniquely present with his uncommon birthday presents for the celebrator, Prof. Femi Osofisan was there as the visionary enabler of the colourful shindig, Ogunbiyi performed excellently as the compere (never mind that Clark almost made the task punishing for him), Prof. Dan Izevbaye serenaded the audience with his insightful lecture (‘The Critic’s Calling’. The full lecture, he said, would be published ‘at the appropriate place’.), Prof. MolaraOgundipe-Leslie showed up and talked gracefully, and Dr Lekan Are wittily revived old memories.

    Prof. AkachiAdimora-Ezeigbo made it there, Prof. Adebayo Williams was not ready to read the reports of the event in the papers, Prof. OluObafemi did not miss it, KunleAjibade sat eminently through the proceeding, the Chairman of The Nation Editorial Board, Sam Omatseye, beamed through it all, Emeriti Profs. Ayo Banjo and Bangbose glowed in the hall, OdiaOfeimun demonstrated the sense in the saying, ‘better be late than never’, and (in order not to bore you with the names of other bright minds) a few other colleagues, friends and family members of BJ added colours to the audience which, needless to say, included other auspicious young minds like this writer.

    The dramatist in Kongi leaped out like the proverbial genie in the bottle. He would present BJ with the ‘birthday gifts’ with practised theatrical ease. What were those gifts he brought in a student-like bag he would not allow anybody to help him with? Let me add that he went to his famous house in Abeokuta to collect the gifts but ended up forgetting them – he had to go back half way to retrieve them. Signs of old age he named it. The gifts: A bottle of Vodka, for Marxists like BJ. He had kept it for many years to gift somebody someday. BJ was the lucky fellow. The wine connoisseur that he is, WS gave the celebrator another bottle of wine. This time one with a name whose meanings define the personage of BJ. It is PRAVDA, the Russian word – and the only word in the universe with two strong meanings – which means TRUTH and JUSTICE. Again, it is the wine, he added, meant for people like BJ with unwavering commitment to the issues of truth and justice. With the salutation of the Pyrates Confraternity (the much misunderstood and maligned group WS founded with some fellow students at University College of Ibadan, now University of Ibadan) and amidst the response of BJ, Soyinka bequeathed the wine to him.

    The third gift was a CD containing a new work of Soyinka on the iconic Mandela, which he titled ‘Mandeland’. He would drop a prophecy: BJ will end his life on a positively memorable note like Mandela; he will become for Africa and the world what Mandiba was celebrated and still being celebrated for. He would congratulate BJ heartily and the former would passionately hug the man whose life and works he has amply delineated in books and essays and monographs.

    BJ would later take the podium and exhale his profound appreciation. He would explain with a touch of deep humour the rationale for picking the Arts Theatre as the venue for the celebration which Osofisan planned with Ogunbiyi. Soyinka almost committed homicide in that hall. There was to be a rehearsal of a Soyinka play in which he, BJ, was to feature in. But before the practice he quickly went to ‘town’, not for coitus but for some bottles. He came back ‘loaded’ and straightaway went to the basement behind the stage and slept off. ‘Where is BJ?’ Soyinka asked in a grave voice. Luckily, someone who had seen him at the basement told WS where he was. He asked the fellow to fetch him. When he, BJ, showed up in his ‘state’, Soyinka gave him some horrible look that gave him the idea that he would kill him.

    In another play in which he acted the role of a person whose pot of gold was stolen, BJ reported that his long lines involved asking the question, ‘Who stole my pot of gold?’ According to him, in the audience that day was a little Indian boy. As he was acting his role, he came to the point in the lines where he asked that question. Surprisingly, the little boy stood up and said, ‘The thieve went that way’. He ignored him the first time. When he asked that question the second time, the boy retorted in the same manner and BJ said ‘Thank you’. The third time again and the poor boy thundered angrily, ‘Are you a simpleton? I said he went that way!’

    The literary gala will be remembered for all of these, and particularly the lecture of Prof. Izvebaye. What he said in the biographical fragments he gave on BJ rings clearly correct. BJ, he noted sensibly, believes his theory and lives his ideology. The thrust of the presentation, which he said was a proposal and not an argument, was on literature and criticism. I will limit my report on the paper to only the point I have made here — I think we should wait for the full paper when it is published.

    May Nigeria find the good leader with the good sense to celebrate its achievers. May the youth come to the realisation that those who remember the great will be greatly remembered.

  • Jeyifo, religion and science

    Dear Sir,

    I write in response to Biodun Jeyifo’s three-part article on “Religion and science, faith and reason”, published in your issues of the October 5th, 12th and 19th October, 2014.

    I have always enjoyed reading his articles in The Nation on Sunday, as they seem to address issues of national importance from the “common man’s” point of view. There are several points raised in his article under consideration, but space will not permit me to deal with them adequately here.

    Although there are several inaccuracies in the article which he himself and Olabode Lucas have tried to remedy in different issues of your newspaper, I would like to comment on his claim that religion and science are not at variance with each other. He writes: “… religion and science are not incompatible, not mutually antithetical. … I mean religious expressions that are not opposed to the rational processes of the human mind … see the hand of God in these processes.” This is a curious statement, for somewhere in his article Jeyifo has told his audience that religion has historically fought a losing battle with science! How can two spheres of life that are supposedly compatible fight wars with each other? We can only resolve this contradiction by saying that religion and science are completely different spheres of human experience. Freethinkers from Anaxagoras through Bertrand Russell to Richard Dawkins have shown religion not only to be evil but also incompatible with the rational, scientific temper of the human mind. Religion thrives on fear, superstition and blind trust. Science is based on facts, on evidence, and on rigorous logic.  There is no common ground on which they can communicate, except at the private level of the individual.

    Jeyifo also claims that “All the Nobel Laureates in the sciences … also believe in God.” This is a blatant lie. In fact, the reverse seems to be true: most scientists in the developed world are atheists. According to statistics quoted by Richard Dawkins in his book, The God Delusion, nearly 79% of the Fellows of the UK’s prestigious Royal Society are nonbelievers, and 93% of the USA’s Members of the National Academy of Sciences are atheists. Their proportions are almost certainly higher in France, Sweden and Japan.

    Richard Feynman, a famous American Nobel Laureate in physics, even said: “God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand.” Most European Enlightenment intellectuals of the 18th century were freethinkers. Einstein was an atheist, as is Stephen Hawking today.

    Individual scientists may, for different reasons, have religious conviction, but this is often independent of their scientific pursuit. The Rev. John Polkinghorne, for example, is an Anglican parson who also won the Nobel Prize in physics, but he has never argued that religion and science are compatible. Georges E. Lemaitre was a Belgian Catholic priest and cosmologist, one of the originators of the big bang theory, who never brought God into how the Universe began, to the consternation of the Pope. Examples such as these abound, today as in the past.

    In Nigeria, the picture is doubly confusing. It seems to me that most Nigerian scientists who turn to God do so for purely pecuniary reasons, perhaps as a reflection of Max Weber’s Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Superstition and fear of the unknown undoubtedly also play a part in pushing many professors to religion. The country seems to produce an abundance of academics (smart guys who can score high marks at exams) rather than intellectuals (those with broad-based education who can engage in genuine critical thinking). It is perhaps not surprising that our national IQ is abysmally low. In a study to examine the relationship between religious belief and national IQ covering 137 countries, the correlation was generally found to be negative: those countries with the highest percentages of believers also scored relatively poorly in their national IQ. On the other hand, Japan had an IQ of 102 with only 35% of its people believing in God.

    While we bemoan the woeful performance of our children at WASC and NECO exams, we should also be concerned that religiously inclined professors of science are contributing to our low national IQ.

    By Gilbert Alabi Diche

    Rayfield, Jos.x

  • Analog is to a single mirror image as digital is to a hall of mirrors: reflections (1)

    Analog is to a single mirror image as digital is to a hall of mirrors: reflections (1)

    I finally knew that I had to write on this subject of the crushing blow that digital technology has dealt analog technology in our world when, a few weeks ago, the NEPA service vendor for my neighborhood in Oke-Bola, Ibadan, advised me to get a digital meter as a replacement for the old analog meter that I, like all other customers of NEPA, had been using up to the present time. The man more or less sang or chanted hymnal praises in celebration of the superiority of digital technology over the utterly disgraced analog instruments and appliances. But when I asked him to tell me precisely what this superiority and the advantages that came with it were, he did not exactly lose his métier, but beyond very broad generalities, he did become rather imprecise. This sent me into some rather cloudy thoughts concerning what I myself knew and did not know about this presumed universal and relentless epochal shift from analog to digital in virtually all parts of the globe. By the time the NEPA man left, I was convinced that I had to sort out things for myself on this very important subject, especially as the man seemed completely nonplussed when I asked whether with the replacement of my old analog meter with its digital equivalent I could assume either that power generation and supply by NEPA would improve or that I, like other costumers of NEPA, could expect more honesty and transparency in the determination of fees for electricity provided by our hapless national power provider. This piece is the first fruit of the project of self-clarification that began with that encounter with the NEPA vendor.

    We can, I assume, accept that everyone reading this piece has seen his or her own image, her own reflection in a mirror. But I think I am not far off the mark if I suggest that most people reading this piece have never seen reflections of themselves thrown back at them in a hall of mirrors. But what we lack in direct experience we can make up with the exercise of our imagination. Thus, I doubt that anyone reading this piece can have any difficulty at all in envisioning the great, incommensurable difference between seeing oneself as reflected in a single mirror image and seeing the endless duplications of the image of the self that one encounters when one wanders into or is plunged into a hall of mirrors. That difference, that incommensurability between the single mirror image and the vast and vanishing horizon of images and reflections of the self is the metaphor that I deem appropriate to the task of giving a concrete differentiating image between analog and digital technologies. I am not certain that this is the best or the most appropriate metaphor that I could have come up with, but I ask the reader to please bear with me as I tease out the implications of this metaphor for the subject of this piece.

    Now since I am a professor of English and Comparative Literature and not of Electronics or Engineering, the reader must take seriously my humble confession that I do not have expert or clear knowledge of the defining technical processes of analog and digital technologies. Although over the years and decades I have tried to make up for the unhappy fact that in high school I was not among the best students in mathematics and the sciences, I do not have the knowledge and the vocabulary to explain to myself and others what exactly is happening when the physical laws of nature and the universe are deployed or even manipulated in engineering in general or electronics in particular. For instance, I am greatly impressed in learning that in both analog and digital technologies, sound or visual waves are converted to electrical signals so that they can be transmitted and then reconverted at a point of reception into the original waves that had been converted into electrical signals. But please don’t ask me about the finer points of exactly how human or natural sounds and sights are either transmitted into electrical signals in the first place or how, at the point of reception, they metamorphose back into the sounds and sights that we hear and see with our human faculties.

    These highly technical processes require some contextualisation in real life experiences. I did enough of Physics in high school to know that all that we see and hear in this life come to us in invisible waves. From that basic knowledge that is backed by my own natural instincts comes my layman’s appreciation of the fact that the essential thing that distinguishes analog from digital technologies is the fact that the transmission and reception of electrical impulses in the former (analog) are much closer to real time and experience than in the latter (digital). This is because in digital technology sound and visual waves are not only changed to electrical signals that are then transmitted and received as recorded, but they are further electronically “refined” by being converted to codes that can be stored and used later in circumstances completely removed their production or occurrence in nature or human activities. Again, please don’t ask me exactly how electrical signals made from sound and visual waves are transformed into codes in digital technology. I have faith in the “explanation” available in the jargon of the experts in the fields of engineering and electronics that states that the analog signal is a continuous signal close to physical measurements while digital signals are discrete or discontinuous codes generated by digital manipulation. This “faith”, though made possible by the powers of abstract reasoning, is in fact rooted in actual experience. Permit me to explain this claim by reference to two key instruments or appliances of analog and digital technologies, these being tape recorders and computers.

    Both in my professional career and in my personal or social life, I have worked a lot with tape recorders. For this reason, I can affirm that it was a great moment for me when the “tape recorders” that I used stopped being tape recorders and became, quite simply, recorders. This, as we all know, was marked by the fact that the magnetic tapes on which recorded sounds were “captured” were simply discarded and that was the end of it: you no longer needed those highly brittle and eminently degradable tapes to record sound. That phenomenon has now been absorbed into my (and our) stock of common knowledge and experiences that we take for granted, but I can never forget the wonder and elation that I felt the very first time when I recorded sound without using tapes and without having to worry about how and where to store what I had recorded. I can now assert – with some regrets – that if digital recorders had been around when I did the research for my first published book that dealt with the traveling theatre movement of Hubert Ogunde, Duro Ladipo, Kola Ogunmola, Amos Olaiya and the others, I would have been spared hundreds of hours of work and worry having to carefully label and preserve every single magnetic tape that I used.

    Since I have written on the subject several times in this column, my remarks on computers in the context of the move from analog to digital technology and appliances will be brief. I never learned completed the task of learning to type on the old, sturdy and for the most part reliable typewriters, whether Remington or Olivetti. Perhaps it was this previous experience that made me at first resistant to learning and mastering typing on the computer keyboard. But once I discovered that digitalisation made the task of typing not really a “task” but a facility that, in comparison with the typewriter, was endlessly much easier and less cumbersome to operate, I quickly became avid in typing on the computer keyboard and producing my own essays, monographs and books. What used to be a chore that I somewhat resented and left to others to do at great cost to my financial solvency became something in which I found much pleasure and fulfilled aspirations.

    I have focused on these two electronic appliances largely because they are so central to my own personal encounter with the digital revolution, the epochal move from analog to digital technologies. For other people, the “totemic” instrument or appliance might be cell phones in comparison the old large and weighty landline phones. Who among us now leaves his or her house without the cell phone? Who in the past could carry their landline phones with them? Perhaps the clearest and the most ubiquitous sign of the “faith” we all now have in digitalisation as inscribed in the cell phone revolution is the fact that cell phones are now deemed indispensable in all the marketplaces of local, national and global communications. If you lose your cell phone, its replacement is swift and relatively uncomplicated. I do not recollect that anyone I knew had such “faith” in landline phones that were the epitome of analog technologies.

    No reflections on digitalisation and its impact on our country and our world can be complete without mentioning the replacement of analog television sets with their digital equivalents, their digital nemesis. At the most obvious level, the picture and sound values are infinitely better in the latter than in the former, apart from the fact that analog sets tend to be bulkier and weightier. I am not making a plug here for flat screen television sets, though I confess that I am susceptible to the aesthetic allure of their sleekness, their élan. I am alluding more properly to the programming and reception that digital sets make possible beyond anything one could have hoped for or received from analog sets. Here I must confess that it was only with the arrival of digital technology on the scene that television broadcasts in our country looked anything close to what you see in other parts of the world with advanced scientific and technological cultures. This particular observation needs some emphasis: television is one of the great cultural legacies of the last century; in the new millennium, it has become even more decisive in bringing national, continental and global communities closer with regard to programming and reception. Nigerian television programming and reception came of age, perhaps could only have come of age, with the advent of the digital revolution. South Africa is far ahead of Nigeria in continental programming and reception. This, I would argue, has a lot to do with which of the two countries had the infrastructures in place to make the most of the digital revolution.

    My own preferred way of understanding and coming to terms with the digital supersession of analog technology lies in critically unraveling the term “digit” that is the root word for “digital”. I think intensely of the digits and integers that are the codes into which digital technology transforms the electrical signals made from human and natural sounds and sights. Sounds and sights as digits and integers? Doesn’t this abstraction, this extreme technological reification of nature and experience carry with it some risks, some hints of alienation and anomy? Is the hall of mirrors a place of utopic fulfillment and/or a site of the loss of the self in empty, confounding amplitude? In plain language, does the digital revolution, in being so dazzling, so talismanic in its instruments, appliances and effects, not carry with it some risks for us all, individually and collectively? These will be the composite starting point in next week’s concluding essay in the series as we go back to my query to that NEPA services vendor: Will my new digital meter lead to improved services and more fairness and honesty in NEPA billing practices?

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu