Tt is many months now since my old teacher at the University of Ibadan, Professor Ayo Banjo, turned 80 and so this tribute should have been written long before now. Nonetheless, and as the saying goes, it is better late than never. And in a way, perhaps it is in fact appropriate that I should have taken my time to write this tribute to Professor Banjo since the nature, the meaning of my studentship under him took a very long time to achieve clarity in my mind. Since this observation goes to the heart of this tribute to my old teacher, I should perhaps clarify what the observation is about. This is all the more necessary since it is this very issue that supplied the title to this tribute which centers round the term, “transformational grammar” which is probably as intriguing to many who are reading this piece as it was to me when I first encountered it in Professor Banjo’s class. But before coming to this matter of my first, initial encounter with “transformational grammar” in Professor Banjo’s class that would later prove fateful to my intellectual development, I wish to say a few preliminary things about the man that set him apart from most people I have ever met.
Everyone reading this piece has, I suspect or hope, come across the saying, “speak no ill of the dead”. If there is a corollary to this saying which asks us to “speak no ill of the living”, I am yet to come across it. The reason for this is simple and it is this: none or few of us has ever met a living person of whom we cannot think of many wrong or evil things that they have, at one time or another and on a small or great scale, done to their fellow human beings. Indeed, so basic is this fact of life that to say “speak no ill of the living” would more or less make us all incurable hypocrites. But with only one other person who incidentally was also my teacher, Professor Banjo is one of the two persons I have ever met of whom it could be said “speak no ill of the living” without being hypocritical. That other person is Mr. Modupe Oduyoye, scholar, publisher and humanist, who was my English teacher in the upper forms of secondary school. Quite literally, I have never met anyone who has had an unkind or disparaging or dismissive word to say about the character and behaviour of Professor Banjo and Mr. Oduyoye and they are the only two people, especially in the world of learning, about whom I can make this assertion.
I have often pondered this fact anytime that my mind goes to these two former teachers of mine. In a terribly corrupt and cruel world, how is it possible to stay above the rot? In a country that is endlessly muddied by a seeming universality of cheating, lying and dissembling on a grandiose scale, how can anyone stay above it all? What inner qualities of spirit and psyche make this possible, this state of moral rectitude or equanimity that seems superhuman and otherworldly? And to be completely honest about this without taking anything away from the reputation of these two former teachers of mine, I have also sometimes wondered if indeed it is a desirable quality or achievement for any man or woman to stay above it all. This is because, as I know only too well from direct experience, it is nearly impossible to remain blameless and unsullied if and when you try to intervene to put an end to the rot, to the bog of decadence and suffering into which our country and our world are sinking almost inexorably and unstoppably. But in spite of these thoughts, Professor Banjo remains in my estimation one of the two avatars of whom one can indeed say “speak no ill of the living” and not be hypocritical. This leads me to the heart of the content of this tribute, the matter of “transformational grammar” as I fatefully encountered it as a student of Professor Banjo.
If my memory serves me right, I took only one class with Professor (then Dr.) Ayo Banjo in my undergraduate studies in the English Department at Ibadan and this was in my first year. He taught in the Language, not the Literature section of the Department. Overwhelmingly, the Literature program was the much larger and more established concentration; only a handful of students of the Department ever went on specialize in Language. [Niyi Osundare, who was two years behind me, is one of the few famous scholarly alumni of the Department who went on to specialize in Language] I entered the Department as a student fairly certain that, like most of my classmates, I would choose the Literature program. This was the major or primary reason why I took only one course – and in my first year – with Professor Banjo. The other reason, though secondary, is however more central to what I have to say in this tribute and it is this: after that one class with Professor Banjo, I became even more convinced of the choice of Literature as my concentration. And “transformational grammar”, as brilliantly but elaborately taught by Professor Banjo, was at the heart of this confirmation that the Language concentration was not for me. Let me explain.
In all my other courses in my first year, I felt fairly on top of the difficulties and challenges, probably because all these other courses had some narrative and imaginative dimensions to them. Incidentally, this included Sociology which was and still is officially classified as a science, albeit a social science. Only in Professor Banjo’s course were these dimensions missing, to be replaced by what seemed like a science that even seemed to me closer to the natural sciences than the social sciences. I had gone into Professor Banjo’s class expecting to have the kind of fun, the kind of excitement that I expected and received from my other courses, but lo and behold, it was as if I was back in my Physics class in high school which, of all the subjects we were taught, had given me the greatest – and for me – ultimately insurmountable challenge. And so from having received an “A” in English Language in School Certificate and GCE “O” level exams, I plummeted to a state of utter bafflement in Professor Banjo’s class on that same Language! And at the heart of it all were the expositions that he gave on, yes, “transformational grammar”.
At this point, it is perhaps time for me to get to what “transformational grammar” is and how my encounter with it in Professor Banjo’s class eventually proved very fateful in my intellectual development. Before that encounter, “grammar” was for me – as it probably still is for most people – the descriptive outline of the ground rules that govern correctness and mastery in language use. It essentially entails learning what the different aspects of language are and how to use them correctly. In “transformational grammar” the emphasis is displaced from descriptive to structural and from correctness to possibility. With “transformational grammar” a completely incorrect sentence can still be “grammatical” and Professor Banjo gave many examples in that class that I took with him. This in itself was exciting but prior to that, our teacher espoused on many concepts and ideas that were completely at variance with all we had learnt about or known as “grammar”. Perhaps the most startling of these was the proposition that transformational grammar was “generative”. What this means is that the great immensity of what could be done and is done with and in language rested on just a few basic principles or properties. In other words, the abundance, the endless possibilities of and in language actually rested on just a few basic structures in grammar.
The reader probably knows from this explanation of “transformational grammar” that my understanding came much, much later after my encounter with the subject in Professor Banjo’s class. And that is exactly what happened, but I have to explain that it was because of the way in which he taught it that made me decide that this was something I had to get to know, get to understand eventually. In other words, after the excitement of being told that a bad, ungrammatical sentence could be structurally grammatical, the rest of what he taught us about transformational grammar seemed to me so technical, so arcane that I was left with a powerful wish to get to the bottom of the matter. And so in graduate school in America, one of the first things I did was start reading everything I could on the subject. And when I did finally achieve an understanding of it, this was central, even decisive in helping me to understand many other extremely complex and challenging intellectual and theoretical currents of non-traditional, modern thought like Marxism, Poststructuralism and Deconstruction. Thus, in a very indirect way that could be likened to negative dialectics, many things that helped to shape my intellectual adulthood began in that class with Professor Banjo in my first year as an undergraduate at Ibadan.
In conclusion, I must confess that I was prompted to lay emphasis in this tribute on a specifically intellectual subject because most of the tributes to Professor Banjo on getting to 80 years that I have read have concentrated on his solid qualification for that rare phenomenon in which, without hypocrisy, one can “speak no ill of the living”. As I salute him on reaching this milestone and wish him a long(er) life with good health, I also want to acknowledge what I took away from my brief studentship under him. The young shall grow – especially if they have teachers like Professor Ayo Banjo.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
