There are these times when uttering words feel too overwhelming, because words sometimes weigh like stones. Such moments are like now, whenwemustmakeofferingsto thememoryofamanlikeBiodun Jeyifo – BJ for short. At his death, I was too tongue-tied to make appropriate tribute.
In these times, when vulgar politicshassulliedallvalues,men like Jeyifo who signaled the primacy of the intellect, and of humane pursuits, and particularly the humane letters, and the humane ideas that seek the build nations, seem irrelevant. The literature of a nation–itsbodyofideas-become irrelevant when the nation itself hasdisappearedoratthecuspof disappearance. Literature is a tool for nation building and nation-consciousness.Nigeriais a nation in regression. It is a victim of what Jeyifo himself discerned,inoneofhismostlucid moments as “arrested decolonization.”
BiodunJeyifowasoneofthose embodiments of the true revolutionary spirit of an age; of intellectuals of my generation, who seemed to us – young, idealisticfolkofthe‘80s-in those yearswhenweweretrulyprimed
to the work of the public imagination, to be what ancient sailors called the Port of Alexandria– Eunostos–the‘port ofsafereturns.’BiodunJeyifowas one of those men of letters with whom we walked ashore to revolutionary or liberatory ideas. The idea of nation. The idea of commitment. The idea of literary authority beyond subalternity. The idea of the sovereign imagination. The idea of an African aesthetic rooted in the cosmopolitan values of Marxism, to which he did not actually find contradiction,butwhichhegave very clear, dialectical interpretations in his own lucid, but also usually coruscating writing.
He was to flinch from Marx yearslater,butnotfromadistinct interpretationandinterrogation of colonialism and its roots in modern capitalism, and the cultural crisis of modernity. Biodun Jeyifo was not Yoruba by ancestry, he was of what was then called the Kukuruku, but he inserted himself firmly into Yorubalife,bythefactofhisbirth in the city of Ibadan, which was resolutely, culturally his. I too was born in Ibadan. He was in fact, one of the two people who used to call me, “Ara ‘badan” – in his case, he would say, “Marinus-Ara ‘Badan!” anytimehesawme,andIgreeted him, from the moment in 2003 when I first fully met him at Cornell University at Ithaca, New York, during a conference organized at Cornell by his now equally late friend and colleague, and teacher of mine, Don Ohadike.
But his large reputation precededhim.Iwasveryshocked and amused in fact, in that first meeting at Ithaca, by the rambunctious meddling of this wiry, bohemian character, who had a very fierce opinion about every literary point. He seemed then to me like a leprechaun, going in and out of sessions, of debates,andofthefightorbattles for ideas. His was theoretically grounded on the radical epistemology. But at this point, it was neither left, nor right, nor center. It was revisionist – much like the thinkers of the Frankfurt School. That was what I thought of, at that first impression of him. Iwasbothimpressedandcritical. But I was also a bit more flattered when after the conference, BJ came over to me and said very good things about my discussion on Okigbo. I had just concluded theMFAinPoetry,andBJactually said,“ifyou’rethinkingofthePhD, you should think of Cornell, and let me know…” I was thinking of Harvard.
But for all kinds of existential exigencies, I had to bat for Saint Louis.Noregrets.Butinhindsight, Iwouldhavebeenveryfortunate, andpossiblymoreillumined,had I taken up BJ’s offer, and worked withhim.Butthatwasthekindof intellectual he was. He grew in the era of the great giants of African literature, and was in his own right, among the giants of modern African letters.
BorninIbadanin1946,Jeyifo’s trajectoriesfollowedthefootsteps of the giants. He found himself, breakingfromthepathwayofthe formal modernity of Obumselu, in his foundational teleology on the discourse of Modern African literature, or Echeruo’s very “Euromodernist” formalism beforehiseventualturn,orAbiola Irele’s, structural, narratological and phenomenological approachgroundedintheFrench “La nouvelle critique,” or Nwoga’s traditionalism, or Obiechina’sexcavatorycriticism, or even Anozie Structuralism because of the influence of his teacher Roland Barthe, towards
establishing the very tradition of Marxist criticism in Nigerian literature,andbatting,alongside the “bolekaja” troika of Chinweizu, Madubuike and Jemie, to constitute the grounds for “decolonizing” the discourse ofmodernAfricanliterature.BJ’s brand of the public intellectual was Herculean and engaged. His activism sprung, not only from the metalangue of poetry, but by the uprisings of street protests in a most dramatic period, and of a dramatic and febrile city, Ibadan, at the onset of nation.
He was thus quintessentially Gramscian – engaged and organic. He was born in Ibadan on January 5, 1946, and by design, ended in Ibadan on 11 February, 2026. In 1966, he was admitted to the University of Ibadan to study English. But his love of Wole Soyinka drew him to Drama. As he himself confessed, “I wanted Soyinka to be my teacher.” And so was he, even if only by his occasional presenceinclassandoncampus, whenever his own brand of public drama and social activism allowed him. Everybody knew that the Playwright, his teacher, was in regular entanglement with the subversive politics of the mid- 1960s.
Ibadan was its cauldron. BJ was a very conscious teen in Ibadan of the “wild, wild West’: thateraofincendiarypoliticsand “Wetie!”,thatpitchedthepeople against the tide of power following decolonization. This period helped in very significant ways to shape Jeyifo’s political commitments and ideological
consciousness. Like Soyinka’s own father, Jeyifo’s father was a life-long NCNC – the nationalist party of Nnamdi Azikiwe. The cityofIbadanitselfwasa“Zikified city.” But by the time of his emergent and rising political consciousness, the image of Awolowo as “Palinurus” held in his“emptycatacomb”,asthepoet Okigbo describes him in “Limits,” held sway in Jeyifo’s mind,andinthemindofhisown generation,whosawindefiance, the radical alternative to compromise. Years and later events might have whittled the image,butby1967BiodunJeyifo wasamongtheyoungPyrateson the campus of the University of Ibadan, engaged in the active politics of defiance, and subversion; holding the mast at the absence of “Cap’n Blood,” whowashimselfimprisoned,and heldinhisownemptycatacomb, by 1967, following his visit to Biafra, and the errands he ran for Colonel Banjo, from Benin.
Wole Soyinka has described these events in intriguing detail in his memoirs – from The Man Died, to Ibadan: the Penklemes Years, and You Must Set Forth at Dawn. What has often not been discerned in that narrative is that Jeyifo was among his young runners.Ihaveheard,althoughI could not confirm, the story of howJeyifowasamongtheyoung radicals, who alongside the likes of Eddie Madunagu, began to buildacorridorandsupplyroutes towelcometheBiafransthrough Okitipupa, and setting up an active commune at Aiyetoro – which was abandoned later. The story of the Aiyetoro commune was hinted on in Soyinka’s 1973 novel, Season of Anomy, and the story of Ofeyi and Iriyise. The pointofallthisistogroundJeyifo on the radical front of the Nigerian national imaginary.
With a First class degree in English from Ibadan in 1970, he went on to New York University (NYU) for graduate school; returned to Ibadan where he taught, and went to Ife, to its
English department. He made his marks at Ife, and was a key figureinwhatwasthenfamously known as “The Ife Collective,” which in due course, following the Nigerian factor, ultimately ran out of steam.
Jeyifo’s leadership of ASUU, his spats with the military dictators who began to “unbuild” the Nigerian university system in the mid- 1980s, and his ultimate escape from Nigeria to teach in some of America’s most prestigious universities, tell the story, in very close terms, of the tragedy of Nigeria, and its unfinished decolonization. The rest is, of course, history. The years most certainly fled from us.
It is now really very startling that the last time I actually saw BJ was at the African Literature Association Conference in Bayreuth, Germany, where he, with his friend, the playwright, FemiOsofisan,rescuedmefrom the wrath of the great Ghanian literary matriarch, Ama Ata Aidoo,whoflaredmightilyatme for writing the biography of Christopher Okigbo without talking to her. “How dare you?” she said, with great choler, and shoed me away from her and fromfurtherconversation.Ittook Jeyifo and Osofisan’s gentle prodding and remonstrances to lowerhersails.Itwasapalliative act: part theatre, part diplomacy. I think back to those now preciousmoments,anditstrikes me,howtrueisthesayingamong my Igbo people, who insist that time is a beautiful bride. You lie withherandcloseyoureyes.The next time you wake and open your eyes, you wonder who or whatspiritliesbesidesyou.Time flies, to put it simply. It is irrecoverable and irrevocable. Our time with Jeyifo has now beenspent.Wemeasurehimnow, by the now timeless place he occupies in the canon of African letters, and his impact in the shaping of the African imagination, in a most productive and dramatic era.