WEST AFRICA REVIEW ISSN: 1525-4488 Issue 11 (2007)

Jane Bryce

When Teju asked if I wanted to write something about BJ, I thought about it and decided I couldn’t. There were many reasons for this. Though BJ was my PhD supervisor at the University of Ife when I was there in the mid-80s, we hardly had an academic relationship. Perhaps because I fell into an in-between category—a mature foreign student, undertaking my own research and not attending classes—I was not well-situated to benefit from his undoubted brilliance and the sense of responsibility he showed towards his undergraduate students. BJ’s centre of gravity was his political activism, especially, at the time, as head of ASUU, and he was constantly on the move in his battered Volkswagen beetle, the socialist car of choice. To get him to talk to you, you first had to catch him, and when he was in Ife, he inevitably had more pressing concerns than advising a free-floating foreigner on her nebulous research. So I dismissed the idea of writing about him because my relationship with him was altogether more complex than that of adviser to student, and I wasn’t sure what I could say.

But because BJ turning 60 was a landmark, not only for him but for those of us who knew him, out of curiosity I got out my journal. During the five years I lived in Nigeria, I kept a daily account in a series of reporters’ notebooks, about 30 of them. When I started looking through them, I was amazed at how often BJ’s name appeared. My arrival in the country coincided with two important public events: the Buhari coup, and the establishment of the Guardian newspaper a few months before. The sense of instability arising from the former was coupled by a feeling of optimism, that anything could happen, a new post-democratic order might yet emerge, and left-leaning intellectuals were ready to play a prominent role. In London, I had been on the periphery of a black political group known as Race Today, in whose office in fact I first met BJ. As a result, he told me kindly, he was inclined to trust me because he knew my politics. Since I was a freelance journalist and looking for work to subsidise my meager scholarship, he offered to introduce me to the editorial board at the Guardian. It was characteristic of BJ that when he came to pick me up in Ife the morning we were to drive to Lagos, I kept him waiting fractionally too long and he left without me. I found my way there by danfo, having learnt the first lesson of dealing with BJ: not to rely on his help but to get on with things myself.

Needless to say, being BJ’s protégé, however tenuously, did me no harm at the Guardian, which became my home and lifeline. There I met and got to know some of the most energetic and committed academics, writers and ordinary journalists it has ever been my privilege to work with, many of whom have remained my friends to this day. Being a young single foreign white woman in Nigeria posed many problems, and my notebooks are full of the anguish of not being taken seriously, being regarded as a sexual adventure by men and as a threat by women. But the Guardian was a haven where I was accepted, where I had an identity, was respected for my work and given opportunities I could not have got anywhere else. Through journalism, I was able to travel all over the country and gain access to people who would otherwise have been suspicious or even contemptuous of me. I took such great advantage of this, and so enjoyed researching and writing for the paper, that I began to rival BJ with the amount of traveling I was doing. I remember clearly, at a point when I was supposed to be sitting down and writing my thesis, and had taken off to Lagos for the week-end, BJ telling me off for being ‘self-indulgent.’

He was right, of course. But again, my notebooks reveal how essential it was to me to be able to escape the claustrophobia of campus life and participate in the vibrant world up the expressway in Lagos. My research was about women’s writing, in the course of which I interviewed many women journalists about their career choices and the social forces which propelled or held them back. I discovered that, while I was fighting my solitary battle to achieve a measure of credibility and relationships that went deeper than idle curiosity, my Nigerian female colleagues had their own struggles, at least as difficult as mine. A consistent theme of my notebooks is that of patriarchy and its treatment of women. Depending on how strong I was feeling, at times I could laugh it off; at others, it would make me hysterical with rage. Coming from a place where I was free to move around as I chose, and didn’t require the presence of a husband or male escort to legitimize me, I found the marginalization of women unbearable. Here is a sample of one entry I made when a friend of mine was being harassed by two men who claimed to be brothers: ‘I’m beginning to see red every time a Nigerian says the word “brother”; it’s a code word for family solidarity, closing of ranks, doing exactly what you like and forcing other people to conform because “brotherhood” is more important than anything else, a refusal to see anyone else’s point of view . . . ’

No doubt my perspective was coloured by the fact that, as an unmarried foreign woman, I had no family, no ‘brothers’, no husband, and therefore no status and so didn’t count for anything. My Nigerian woman friends had their own ways of dealing with the ‘brotherhood’, but these were not available to me. Worst of all, the socialists were just as bad – even in Ife, at an institution devoted to intellectual equality, women served the refreshments at public occasions while men sat on the platforms. BJ, I’m happy to say, was an exception. At least intellectually, he understood the politics of gender and was prepared to take a stand. I remember an occasion at the Guardian when I was trying to claim my pay for articles I had written, and a particular senior editor said patronizingly: ‘Look at this girl. What does she need money for?’ ‘I’m not a girl,’ I retorted. ‘A lady then,’ the editor smugly amended. ‘She’s a woman’, interpolated BJ, rescuing me from impotent fury.

If we didn’t have academic conversations, my notebooks reveal that again and again I would arrive back in Ife and pour out my frustrations to BJ. He would listen and make judicious and supportive comments. Sometimes, more rarely, I was in a position to be supportive to him, but generally he provided an alternative perspective in which to place my experiences. I hope it’s not presumptuous to say so, but he was, in short, a friend. Mercurial, unpredictable, but in certain respects rock-solid reliable, BJ’s socialism liberated him from the reverence for hierarchy which distorted so many relationships. In his own way, he too was a misfit, an anomaly in his own society. As an intellectual who had made his career as a cultural critic, at a seminar on the occasion of Soyinka’s 60th birthday, he spoke of how criticism was perceived, referring to Soyinka’s own inaugural address of a few years before. Like most literary scholars, I revered Soyinka as almost unassailable in his achievement as a creative artist, so it was instructive to me that he too was part of a wider dialogue and that his colleagues could disagree with him. According to BJ, Soyinka had questioned the social value of criticism, asking: ‘For whom do critics write? What are their values?’ Quoting the proverb: ‘The carver has carved what he had in mind, but there are those who’d like to carve their mouths while speaking about it,’ BJ defended the role of critics in the creation of culture. He analysed the Nigerian context as one of neo-colonial universities designed for the creation of an elite, rather than a dialogue about culture which incorporated everyone. He pointed out how the social division of labour meant that to be elevated within the university system – for example, to be made a professor – spelt the end to what he called critical action. And he concluded with a statement which has turned out to be prophetic: ‘The only people who can provide a way out are the radical intelligentsia, since this country has not produced an intelligentsia of the right, and I don’t think it will.’ That concept, of criticism as action, as a distinct practice and a political intervention in its own right, is one which has guided me ever since, and is perhaps the single unique gift he gave me as an academic mentor. Beyond that, the claim he staked for the role of a radical intelligentsia in national life is one that has been sadly eroded in Nigeria, from where most intellectuals have fled. BJ’s recent decision to spend half the year in his home country, just as the prospect of a comfortable post-academic retirement beckons in the US, is a sign of the strength of his own convictions.

I have seen BJ rarely in the years since he left Ife for the US and I completed my PhD and came to the University of the West Indies. The most recent occasion was in July 2006, at some of the celebratory occasions marking another 60th birthday, that of Femi Osofisan’s. At a round-table on his work at the National Theatre in Iganmu, Lagos, I was invited to join the all-male panel of theatre experts, and found myself seated next to BJ. As the discussion raged to and fro, I sat silent, until in response to a question from the floor about Osofisan’s feminism, BJ spoke up. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a question for the token woman among us. Let us hear a woman’s voice.’ Twenty years on, BJ retains the fire and passion, the clarity and readiness to confront inequality, that endeared him to me as a graduate student. You still have to catch him if you can, but when you do, you get your money’s worth.

Citation Format:

Jane Bryce. “Tribute to BJ” West Africa Review: Issue 11, 2007.

Copyright © 2007 Africa Resource Center, Inc.