WEST AFRICA REVIEW ISSN: 1525-4488 Issue 9 (2006)

Akin Adesokan

Biodun Jeyifo, Professor of English at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, who turned 60 on Thursday, January 5, periodically teaches a graduate course titled "Marxism and Postcolonial Discourse." One of the texts on the reading list for the course is a fine play, Translations, by the Irish dramatist, Brian Friel. The play about the administrative aspects of English colonialism in Ireland is exceptional in many ways, but one of its greatest delights is a character called Hugh, a school-teacher who habitually lists three points—A, B, and C—on which he will speak to his students. However, by the time he is done, Hugh only manages to take his listeners from Points A to B, while the third point languishes forgotten in the jumble of his perorations. Jeyifo, or "BJ" as he is popularly addressed by colleagues and friends in Nigeria, the UK, and the US, was self-deprecating enough to compare himself to this character once but with a difference: he would often tell the class, 'This is the final point I have to make', but fifteen minutes later he would still be going strong, and after that there would be yet another "final, final" point to make. Thus it is that the phrase, "Finally, finally" is one with which BJ's former and current students are quite familiar.

Although Professor Jeyifo is by no means a shy person, it is also the case that he is not one for self-advertisement. The idea for this interview came from a wish to listen to his views on certain issues of deep political and intellectual importance about the place of Africa and other "postcolonial" societies in the current global scheme of things. Occupying a special place among African intellectuals who came of age in the heady days of decolonization and who have continued to teach, lecture, and write about the values associated with that history, he nevertheless showed a remarkable hesitation to open up, for reasons that may become clearer as the reader goes deeper into this conversation. Yet, such is the man's genuine love of learning, so firm his grasp of many issues that even when, in a reversal of Hugh's mannerism, he promises to say little, he ends up delighting the listener (and hopefully the reader) with the telling richness of his analyses and perspectives. A preeminent scholar of Anglophone literatures—the English-language literary writings from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, Ireland and other "emergent" postcolonial sites--as well as a notable Marxist cultural and political theorist, Jeyifo was also one of the most important presidents of the Academic Staff Union of Universities in Nigeria, in the early 1980s. This radical, progressive dimension of his status as a teacher has continued to play an integral role in his work, even if, as he discloses here, he is equally attentive to other dimensions of human experience that do not strike an immediate political note. This interview is an edited version of a conversation with Akin Adesokan in late November 2005, in Bloomington, Indiana, U.S. In the interview, Professor Jeyifo fields questions on topics as wide-ranging as the complex issues of brain-drain and the repatriation of intellectual skills; the impact of global economic forces on the fortunes of African countries; the disappointing records of the bourgeoisies in Africa and other developing parts of the world; and his own experience as an activist intellectual.

“Migrant Academics And Organic Intellectuals”

You now spend more time at home, more frequently than used to be the case . . . There's a certain frequency that's quite observable. . .

Actually, there is not a significant change in the pattern of my returns home because even when I was in graduate school, the four-and-a-half-to five-years that I spent in graduate school (in the US), it was only one year that I didn't go home. It was hard for me as a graduate student from Nigeria, with the little stipend on which I had to subsist, but I managed to scrape money together to go home nearly every year. So, in the present period of my sojourn out of the country in the last eighteen years, the only period I didn't go home at all were the Abacha years. And that was because I was very active in the external opposition to the regime. Other than those years, I did, and do, go home every year. You're of course right that in the last five years, it's been rather frequent, sometimes twice in a year.

So, in this post-Abacha period, is there a reason for that?

Yes, there's a reason, but for now I can only speak very briefly about it. This is basically the fact that I've generally been positioning myself, as I go into my early 60's, to re-integrate myself into the country, ultimately go on half-time, spend half the year in the US, and the other half in Nigeria, if and when I retire. Which is another proposition altogether because I probably will never retire. I'll probably drop dead, at some point, on the job, as a teacher. So, I'm positioning myself for a new phase of existence where I divide my time between here in the U.S. and home. So in the last five years or so, I've needed to go home, sometimes twice a year, to physically set up a basis for that re-integration. In Ibadan specifically, I've constructed a house, part of the family complex, which will be my living abode and my working space. So I've had to go back and supervise that construction project, and this is why my visits have been frequent in the past couple of years.

There's another dimension to "construction" in the frequency of my recent return journeys home, but I cannot talk much about this at the moment. All I'll say is that I am looking to set up an information and documentation centre, a sort of cultural think-tank which will be positioned as part of the national conversations going on in the West African region in the wake of neoliberal globalization and the challenge of appropriate responses to the distortions it imposes our peoples. To invoke an image from the universe of Achebe's fictional works, the "thing" that is looming ahead on the political horizon of the post-Abacha period, or the Obasanjo interregnum, not only has a head, it also wears a hat! The centre, the cultural think-tank that I hope to set up, will work with all genuine progressive compatriots to unmask and de-fang this "thing"

You left Nigeria to assume an academic position in an American university at a time that neoliberalism, or what we generally call globalization, was on the ascendancy. You're part of the so-called brain drain. How do you respond to that, given your history as an activist intellectual?

It's a subject on which I've written an extended essay titled, ironically, "One Year in the First Instance!" The essay is in a collection of essays in honor of Emmanuel Obiechina. It's the last essay in that collection. I wrote the essay after a long reflection on the whole movement of very influential scholars from Africa into the West, in this period of neoliberalism. I wrote that essay nearly six years ago, but I do have a few things to share in the light of further reflection. My general comment will again be very brief, because the brain-drain phenomenon is a very complex issue.

For now, I'll say is that we ought to get into a new phase of discussion of this problem, looking for examples, for guidance in the way that discussions in other regions of the world have tried to address this problem of brain-drain in the developing world.

It's basically to say that in this new discursive phase, discussion of the problem needn't resolve into questions of personal guilt, personal anguish about having been, or conversely not been, part of this brain-drain from Africa.

We're all subject to very, very strong forces of history, of economics, of the professionalization of middle-class intelligentsia throughout the world whereby for so many personal and not-so-personal reasons, most academics find that in order to fulfill themselves professionally, they have to move to the best funded, the best organized research institutions in the world, most of which are of course located in the West.

So, the long and short of it as I see it now, is that the burden on both sides - those who have left and those who never left - is how to make the most out of this situation, in institutional terms, embracing both the negatives and the positives that this situation creates. I'll give you an example of what I am urging here, an example from South Asia, especially India. Many Indian academics in North American universities have some kind of arrangements with Indian universities, Indian think-tanks, Indian independent research institutions, like a particular research institution that I have in mind, called SARAI. These institutions provide the space for scholars based outside the country to come back to India for periods and hold seminars and dialogues with those who have stayed behind.

These bilateral arrangements have the effect of minimizing the deleterious consequences of the brain-drain phenomenon on tertiary education in India. I think that African institutions have to get into these sorts of arrangements also. The basic issue of course is that African educational institutions themselves have to be strengthened, because collaboration with the "brain-drain denizens" can only be some kind of supplement, not a substitute, to the internal vitality of African tertiary institutions. That's the primary agenda on the historical horizon: the revitalization of African universities.

But meanwhile, however, we're not even focused on that, we're thinking one-sidedly and unproductively on the brain-drain.

One of the things routinely left out of the discussion, especially in a place like Nigeria, is the fact that even if the brain-drain hadn't happened, something else happened which considerably destroyed higher education in our country. And this is the rapid, unplanned, chaotic and politically motivated expansion of universities. This has devastated higher education in Nigeria and furthermore, it's still an ongoing, an unfolding phenomenon.

Distinct and separate from the brain-drain problem, that phenomenal and almost totally unplanned and politically motivated expansion of African tertiary education in itself was damaging enough; very few places in the world could survive that kind of rapid, unplanned deluge. These are pressing problems, and we need to address them in more productive ways than the current mea culpa wherein accusations and counter-accusations about brain-drain serves to distract us from engaging this hugely important rapid and chaotic over-expansion of African universities in the last few decades, especially in Nigeria and South Africa.

Last night we saw the film The Constant Gardner, based on a novel by John Le Carre, about how the drug companies and the diplomatic communities collude . . .

To use Africans as human guinea pigs . . .

Yes, to test drugs. And we had a fairly extensive discussion on the way in which the film absolutely excludes the possibility that Africans can have a say in their own affairs. Now I want to be provocative about this . . .

Please be as provocative as you can be . . .

Well then: there's a lot of African academics like yourself, a whole generation of some of the brightest and most gifted African intellectuals who, as we've said, are based outside the continent. Don't you think that this sort of absence provides a basis for the total skepticism about the ability of Africans, of all groups and classes, to intervene in the actions of powerful foreign forces in and on Africa that we saw in the film?

No, I don't think so. I'm glad that you want to make this as thought provoking as possible. Now, I will posit a counter-thesis against the view of that film about Africa and Africans: that in our country and continent, there is an adequacy of will, imagination and initiative to intervene in the policies, the impact of these powerful foreign forces on the African continent. One of the reasons I feel fairly energized about my effort to reintegrate myself into the Nigerian and broadly speaking West African community, is the fact that in all of my recent trips back home, I've looked carefully beyond what's observable or perceptible on the surface. I've looked at possible points of growth and renewal, and they exist. But you have to look for them. They're not reported well in the local press, and not reported at all in the international media. And that's what drives a film like The Constant Gardner: the things that are vibrant and purposive and pregnant with possibilities in Africa are so "invisible" that you have to have the sort of eye, the sort of ideological predisposition to actually see them...

Can you give any examples of these signs?

Oh, I can give you many examples. Some I can't mention for the basic reason that these initiatives are so distant from the prevailing orthodoxies, the prevailing official discourses on Africa that they have to be protected while they're still in their infancy.

But there are a few of the more visible ones in Nigeria that can be explicitly identified, like, for instance, the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, which is not a registered political party, but which is really documenting many issues of the violations and abuses of human and political rights. Have you ever read about the CDHR in the foreign press? How much of that is reported locally, even in Nigeria? Dedicated people doing the most unglamorous work of documenting the so-called extra-judicial killings, documenting these assiduously, and raising awareness that this ought not to be happening in post-independence Africa.

Let me mention another dimension. If you look at the so-called parallel market, the so-called informal economy, you will see tremendous resilience. Hundreds of thousands of small entrepreneurs and proprietors and vendors making ends meet, against all odds and often with outstanding improvisational genius. Meanwhile, the official economies and markets, in many countries, have either virtually collapsed or are quite close to doing so.

Physical infrastructures and institutions are grossly inadequate and where they exist at all, they're not well maintained and the capacities and skills to maintain them, to improve on them, are not socially reproduced from generation to generation. But that's at the ground level of observable phenomena of economic and social life on our continent.

If you look at the sub-zero level, you see a lot of creativity. Mind you, when I say this, I'm not saying that that's our salvation, but that you can see the kernel of the resilience and the creativity that can be translated into something far more productive and enduring.

So, my response in terms of the film The Constant Gardner is that people who make that kind of very paternalistic film about Africa cannot see the kinds phenomena and processes I've pointed out. And neither can some of our own people. You won't believe how many people look at me and say: What are you coming home to do? We are trying to get out, and you're coming back?!

So, I'm saying that the problem of how to engage Africa's marginalization in the new global order, at both personal and collective levels, is so deep that even those who are mindful of the need for social transformation both on our continent and in the world at large cannot see those things I've pointed out.

Okay, but why can't they see this? Is it that there's too much reality, because I don't think you're saying that they lack perception?

That's exactly what I'm saying, but let me couch it very carefully. First of all, the usual indices people use to measure progress and the capacity to act on one's own destiny is not the ones I'm invoking right now.

People these days talk about governance, gross domestic product, and stakeholder mobilization for state policy. That's the level people generally look at. For instance, if you think of productivity at the level of agricultural policy and the question of food production and you look to the dismal, sorry state of G.D.P and "governance" and the so-called stakeholder mobilization for participation in state policies in many parts of Africa, if you look at the problem from these standpoints then the future looks bleak, looks hopelessly dismal.

At that level of bureaucratic mindset, with things like stakeholders - a term I hate with a passion because it uncritically applies a model of accumulative entrepreneurship to vital social and human issues - if you're looking at Africa's progress through the prism of "stakeholders', you won't see the things I am pointing out, the "hidden" growth points of possibilities and renewal in our country and continent. When people look at things through these sorts of lenses then they can't see what I'm saying.

Let me remind you of a discussion we once had, and I said something that shocked you. You were rather startled when I said that Gani Fawehinmi as a candidate, and his party, the National Conscience Party, NCP, stood no chance at all in the elections of 2003.

Yes, I remember that.

Fawehinmi is one of the most courageous, selfless and untiring fighters for social justice in the country and incidentally also one of the most popular public intellectuals in Nigeria. But he stood no chance, even if the elections had been "free and fair' - which of course they were not. Why so? Precisely because of the issue of the model of action and analysis, the model of perception you're applying to electoral politics in our continent and indeed in many other parts of the world, including the rich, industrial nations.

In simple and plain terms, when you enter the arena of electoral, party politics, you're entering an arena in which the rules of the game have been fixed and are massively rigged against poor, marginalized people and those who speak and agitate for them.

Historically, bourgeois electoral politics is based on rules and protocols heavily rigged against poor people; more importantly, these rules, protocols and practices have massively corrupted the poor and the oppressed. For instance, there were stories narrated to me by members of the National Conscience Party, Gani's own party, of how they went to Ajegunle, and told people what the NCP was about, how it was different from the other parties, their programs, and so on. Then, they got up to go. And people said: "You're leaving? Is that all? No "envelopes"? Do you know how much we were given yesterday, when so-and-so came here?"

It's like the concept of differend formulated by the French postmodernist theorist, Jean-Francois Lyotard, which goes like this: if you're a litigant in a dispute in which the formal rules of arbitrating the dispute are against you regardless of the justice of your cause, it is futile for you to fight within the existing rules. You will need to go outside the existing rules and devise a new set of protocols, otherwise you will lose. In this instance, we're talking about electoral politics in which the rules are both written and unwritten.

I remember the discussion and I was quite hopeful on the basis of the Chief's popularity and the need for his kind of politics.

Yes, there's no question of that. Gani deservedly commands enormous respect throughout the length and breadth of the country. But I said that even if the elections were "free and fair", he would not win. But of course in the present dispensation, the elections can never be free and fair. (Laughs.)

Now, is that a critique of the left in Nigeria?

In a sense, yes, though I'm not necessarily saying that radical activists and leftists give up on electoral politics in the country. That's not what I'm saying. I think it will be a grave mistake for progressive forces all over the world, and especially in Africa, to turn their backs on electoral politics. No, they shouldn't. The reason basically is that you have to combine both electoral and non-electoral, mass movement politics.

A quick bit of biographical fact here. Between 1978 and 1985, I spent a hell of lot of a time debating about the need for a party of the Left in Nigeria. I traveled all over the country, wasting a lot of time. I say waste now, but I didn't think of it that way at the time. The Left eventually formed a party, and I was minimally involved.

So, I have that background for the things I'm saying now. The reason I'm now arguing for a combination of electoral and non-electoral politics is that by the kind of mass movements you set in motion outside of electoral politics, you can bring considerable ideological and moral weight to bear on the actual electoral process. You can't do without one or the other.

The problem is that people now go into electoral politics without a mass, progressive movement. Nowhere in the world, even in bourgeois liberal democracies, and definitely within the democratic movements in the developing countries, nowhere can you affect electoral politics without mass movements behind you.

I remember that around 1987, just before you left Nigeria, you granted an interview to a few of your former students, and it was published in The Guardian newspaper. I remember reading it many years later, and one of the things you said was that the university system in the country had been taken over by mediocrities and obscurantists. This was under Babangida. So, is your unwillingness to go back into the Nigerian university system now that you're reintegrating yourself into the country, is your unwillingness a reflection or product of the capture of the Nigerian university system by the forces of mediocrity or is it that your work in American universities for so long is a factor in this matter?

There are at least two, possibly three responses to this question, and again as in my responses to most of the other questions, I can only be provisional and not exhaustive in my response. There will be occasions for a more exhaustive discussion and analysis of these problems. So I will just touch on a few basic issues.

One, when I left the Nigerian university system in 1987, and granted that interview to Kunle Ajibade and others who had been my students and it was published in The Guardian, as you said, I did say in that interview that I was forced to resign from Ife. But however, the technical reason was that I applied for a leave of absence without pay. This was something that was routinely granted to people in the Nigerian university system, to grant a leave without pay so that one can complete a scholarly project. And this application was supported by everybody in my department. But the university authorities turned it down - this was under Wande Abimbola - they turned it down because they wanted to force me to resign. So, they said either you don't take this leave, or you take it and leave. And I left. So, that was the technical reason.

But in that interview, I also did say, and I'm repeating this now, that if that had not happened, if they had granted me that leave, I didn't see myself when I returned from that leave that I was going to go back into the university system. I had reached a point of crisis. At that point I had decided with a clear-headed realization that I had reached a point of no return, and was set to become an independent scholar. That decision was clear in my mind.

After that application for leave, I was going to resign and live as a freelance, independent scholar until the situation in Nigeria universities improved. At that stage, I was not alone, and many other people were as well calling for reform of the system. But we were lone voices crying in the wilderness, and I saw no possibility of reform ahead.

Personally, I was opting out of that system and I was going to become an independent scholar. How and why I didn't become an independent scholar, but stayed on in the US, is a story for another day. But I stated clearly in that interview if you go back to it, that I was at a point that I didn't want to continue with the system. So that's one level.

The second level is that however, this is 17 or 18 years later, and what was then a crisis has now become a monumental calamity. The collapse of tertiary education in Africa has become a monumental catastrophe. What we have now is massive and pervasive reproduction of certified mediocrity. I am not engaging in empty phrasemaking here. I'm trying to be as precise, as descriptive as I can. What we have now is a reproduction of certified mediocrity. That is, in plain terms, people are certified, up to bachelor and master's degrees, even including Ph D's, and they're half-baked, "emergency academics", the way you have "emergency contractors" at all sectors and levels of our national economy. They can't write, they can't function as highly trained manpower.

But no society in the modern world can survive without producing highly trained manpower to compete effectively in the global village. The immediate cause of this, as I've explained, is the rapid, unplanned and chaotic expansion of the university system in Nigeria. When I entered Ibadan in 1967, there were six universities. And of those six, Ibadan was the premier institution. Ibadan was in the first generation all by itself. Then in the second generation you had places like Lagos, Nsukka, Ife, Ahmadu Bello. And then there was the third generation, which came later with schools like Jos, Benin, Ilorin.

At that stage, the expansion of the university system was rational and manageable. Bu by the time the fourth, fifth and sixth generation universities came into existence, chaos and total absence of vision took over. And the rapid turnover of the system became irredeemably captive to political chicanery. And when I say politics here, it is the politics of sectionalism, of statism, of the fragmentation of the country under the very powerful motive force of regional, or state, or ethnic irredentism.

That was also the practice of state creation . . .

Yes, state creation. Which is then immediately followed by the creation of state universities. What we have to be absolutely clear-headed about is that unlike primary or secondary schools, universities have a long type of what scientists call "half-life" in terms of their evolution into stable and reputable institutions. A university, any university, has to develop gradually. You can't will its stability, integrity and reputation into existence by fiat, the way you create political, administrative states.

If you look at the first-rate institutions all over the world, they're not built overnight; this is a fact of social, and cultural and intellectual history. Every single institution that is worth its while has to be carefully nurtured, both in terms of the physical infrastructure, and most importantly, in terms of human resources. You can't simply call them into existence.

The tragedy here is that it is not only that the political leadership has been totally without vision, the intellectual elite have also collaborated in a massive display of opportunism on a colossal level. So that we're now at a level where the third factor is the privatization of tertiary education in Nigeria. That's not inherently a bad thing; in fact, under the right conditions, it could be a boon to the survival and renewal of the state-funded, public universities. But there's no functioning, autonomous and respected system of inspection and regularization or coordination of standards in our country and for that matter in many national African university systems.

In such a context of deep-rooted institutional malaise, the privatization of universities is an open invitation to the crassest forms of profiteering, commercialism and opportunism. Perhaps in the next decade or two water would find its level as the saying goes and some universities will separate and distinguish themselves from the present rot, but right now, the enthronement of mediocrity is calamitous, though it ought to be strongly stated that there are many, many individual academics in the system whose ability to withstand the rot and continue to do good, solid work is nothing short of heroic.

You're right about that. Yet, if there's still one professional association that has remained resistant to this large-scale rot, it would have to be ASUU. There's been a great deal of degeneration as you said within the society. There's the problem of campus cults, crass commercialization of public spaces and academic programs, and so on. I mean, the fact that you could get an MBA in some universities so long as you were able to pay for it. But in spite of that, there's still this organization that has not yielded. Now, these people are your comrades and all that, and I'm not asking you to praise them. Rather, I would want you to sort of address ASUU's situation within the context of pervasive rot that you've been talking about.

Well, here I have to be very frank about one dimension of this particular issue of progressive intelligentsia on the continent, in West Africa, and in Nigeria. Because I locate ASUU within that framework. I have to be frank to say that I've been so personally and intimately involved in it that most of what I need to say I would leave for when I write my memoirs. This is largely because - and this is all I'm going to say in the present context about the personal dimension, and I'm saying this again very carefully - I consider the work I put into ASUU, joining with others to build it into what it was, I consider this the single most fulfilling project of my adult life. Far above the books I've written, far above the students I've produced, including present company, if you don't mind (Laughs.)

I consider the work I put into ASUU as the single most fulfilling work of my intellectual and political existence, so I'm highly invested in it. That's why I can't say much now. The little I'll say - and I realize now I've said this too often today - what I will say is that the first four sets of ASUU presidents after me marked what I would call the golden years of ASUU.

Every institution, every organization has the need to constantly renew itself. ASUU is in a great, pressing need of self-renewal, self-reinvention. Because some of the perspectives and tactics that we used then are not exactly moribund now, but they have to be rethought, and I'm not satisfied that ASUU is doing that, or is in a position to do it. I want to be very clear on this.

You're absolutely right: ASUU is one of the few surviving national organizations with a vital, and progressive, and courageous role to play, especially among the political and intellectual elite. It's playing a distinctive role, a leading role that gives it legitimacy and vitality in the public life of the country. So, I want to affirm that. Having said that, I want to be equally insistent that ASUU has a very vital need to fundamentally rethink some of its tactics, and its vision also.

Well, I don't want to push you on this matter because as you said, it's an important matter, and you have a different context for reflecting on the issues. But putting it this way is like reinforcing some accepted attitudes about ASUU within the country.

No, no, no, no.

I'm saying that when people come across this kind of view, they look past all the provisional points, the qualifications you've made. Because each time ASUU makes its case, there are knee-jerk reactions like, Oh, these people again! So, if you don't mind, could you just sketch out what the self-renewal could entail? Is it in terms of what you said earlier about combining electoral politics with other forms of mass political organization?

Again, I don't want to give the impression of evading your question. I will not be as exhaustive as I can be, but however, I will give one response. Because in fact, this need for reinvention, I locate it as far back as even my own presidency, or just prior to my leaving office as President of ASUU, and I will give one instance. Again, I'm stating this consciously for the purposes of historical records.

When I was the president of ASUU, in my second and last year in office, I tried to initiate a conversation within the national executive first of all, and then later on within the rank and file of ASUU in all the branches of the union. I failed. I wanted to start a discussion on precisely that problem of the rapid expansion of universities, the aimless idea of spreading resources, human and financial, too thin, too quickly.

I mooted the idea with a few members of the national executive. And one by one, almost everyone called me and cautioned me that it was too explosive a point to raise. That it would divide the membership of ASUU, that it would lay us open to divisive politics by external forces. One of the legitimate aspects driving the expansion of the Nigerian university system--because we have to be clear about one thing: the call for the expansion of the university system at a certain level is a call for greater egalitarian, democratic possibilities for all parts of the country.

Yes, because education is always lopsided in Nigeria in favor of the south.

Quite so, and that lopsidedness remains one of the abiding problems of the country, up till today. When I tried to have the Union discus the rapid expansion of university education in the country, I was warned and cautioned that if I raised it at that point in time when we had just succeeded in building a unified, cohesive union, I was likely to instigate divisive politics. I was more or less persuaded to drop the matter.

In hindsight - of course, one speaks in hindsight, as an older man, probably a little more mature - I think I could have found a way, both to recognize that caution, and also to find a way around it. To initiate a conversation was not to say, stop the creation of more universities. It was to say, look, address this problem! That you cannot start such a massive project without having certain guidelines to balance the pros and the cons and what the process was likely to entail.

That was what I was calling for. But it was quickly read as, "It's too dangerous, it's too delicate, don't let us go there!". That's what I'm invoking again. Those who say, "Howu, ASUU is always on strike" are coming at this problem from a different perspective from the one I am adopting here. I'm simply saying that even as far back as the golden years of ASUU, there was always the need to rethink our positions and finesse our views and perspectives.

If there was that need then, the need is even greater now. For instance what ASUU needs to do, by way of really enhancing its legitimacy and its promise, is to be part of the present national conversation in a way that even those now within universities who are some of the most demoralized about ASUU should be genuinely and constructively brought into the conversation.

As far as I know, ASUU isn't doing that. What I see in place of such conversation across all the ideological and political groupings within ASUU is that the enemies of ASUU have used this absence of an ecumenical conversation within the entirety of its membership to maximum effect. What they call the voice of the silent majority. (Laughs.) Why doesn't ASUU take the wind out of the sails of those enemies and enter into dialogue with them? So, that's one item I will mention. At any rate, I want as much as possible to put a distance between myself and those who say it's all the same thing all the time, those who condemn the strikes, and whatnot.

I would love to get through the same question from a slightly different angle. Something came up during our discussion yesterday, but we didn't go into details. It was what you were saying about the current global left, through the work of the World Council of Churches, or the World Social Forum, which would sort of represent a center for the disparate forces that one might loosely call socialist. But the formation that I'm interested in is what I call, in my own special coinage, "the Kayode Fayemi mailing-list."

Recently, when Fayemi, the former director of the Center for Democracy and Development, CDD, was leaving the organization, he sent an email, and in that email, there must have been close to 200 people. And these were mostly Africans. So, there's this elite class of Africans, who are not de-linked from the political processes in the countries from which they individually came, but at the same time not integrated in the sense of being part of national governments. Yet, this is a crucial element, and it's been spawned by the agenda of globalization. Now, I'm suggesting that a critical element in the transformation of what we may call Nigerian, or West African, or African political community is constituted by this class...

You're talking about NGOs, the civil society formations?

Yes. And to go back to an earlier question, this is some kind of contradiction between the fervor and optimism of leftist politics in the 70s and the 80s, and the fact that what we have now is so different. What the left set out to fight has so become crucial to its survival that we now have people who are taken with the ideas and ideologies of free market, Karl Popper, and so on. Given the kind of position you've taken for the past thirty to thirty-five years, how do you deal with this kind of contradiction?

You see, I have to say something here. Without question, it's a very controversial point to make, and I'm going to make it as forcefully as I can. What you've just pointed out is a very big issue in the developing world, especially in Africa. That is, in the aftermath of either the collapse of the state, or of gradually failing states, non-statist, non-governmental and civil society organizations have stepped in massively.

I want to say with every emphasis I can muster that civil society organizations, NGOs that are not rooted in mass politics are at best a palliative, are at best some form of Band-Aid for the open, festering sores of mass poverty and dispossession in our continent. And many of the NGO's are caught in that trap. That is, they are at the behest of donor organizations, either of the right or of the left, or of multilateral organizations like the United Nations, UNESCO, UNDP, and so on.

And generally speaking, they do not have the authenticity and the rootedness of the received conceptions of the left, like the so-called organic intellectuals. I'm not invoking that in the abstract, because in this country, when I say "organic intellectual", some people might think of "intellectual" in an abstract sense. And for the benefit of our compatriots who may be reading this, I'll give an illustration that might help them appreciate the kind of value or meaning I associate with the term "organic intellectuals".

One of the most important political developments of the Second Republic in Nigeria was the capture of state power in Kaduna and Kano states by the People's Redemption Party. The leading figures in the PRP were organic intellectuals. People like the late Yusuf Bala Usman, the assassinated Bala Mohammed, and the still living Balarabe Musa, and all the others who are not so well known but were part of the movement, in Zaria, in Kano, in Kaduna. They were all organic intellectuals. So also were for instance, some colleagues in the Ibadan-Ife axis, who had very deep roots with peasant organizations - here I won't mention names. (Laughs.) They sank, or tried to sink very deep and solid roots in mass movements of workers, rural communities, and peasant organizations.

So, I want to state with as much emphasis as I can, that that's the crisis civil society organizations have to face. At one level, they're doing incredibly important work because in places where the state has more or less collapsed and is not fully functional beyond the capital city, these non-statist organizations are providing badly needed services, utilities and empowering tools for the poor, the dispossessed, the forgotten of our societies in Africa and the developing world.

Even in a country like Nigeria where the state has not (yet) calamitously failed, what it's doing by way of responsibility for the majority of the citizenry is abysmal. In this kind of environment, the civil society organizations are doing important work. And I did mention earlier the example of the CDHR. I don't fault them on that level. What I'm saying however is that an overwhelming majority of NGO's and civil society organizations have no roots among mass organizations, workers' collectives, and so on. And the donor agencies know this only too well.

Sure. It's part of their own strategies to create this special elite, because all of this dates back to a deep suspicion of 'communism', broadly defined.

Now that you've brought that up, let me say that what we see in neoliberalism as a historic phenomenon is something very, very momentous. I describe it as the strategic escalation of the war of capital against labour on a global scale. Strategic escalation because labour is everywhere in the global economic order scattered, fragmented and dispersed while capital still follows the age-old logic of accumulation and centralization, with immensely enhanced capabilities of mobility in the world's "free" markets. Because the escalation of that war of capital on labour is so decisive, so massive that the repercussions of these have to be contained, most NGOs are positioned to step in to provide some sort of relief for the worst effects of this historic situation.

The problem is that most NGOs and civil society organizations don't possess an awareness of the strategic issues involved in this global war of capital on labour. Note though that I use the word "most" in relation to NGOs and civil society organizations. This is because I am only too aware of many exceptions to this general norm, I am only too aware of some NGOs in this country and in other parts of Africa which are run by organic intellectuals and thus have and cultivate deep, non-paternalistic connections to communities and movements of the working classes and dispossessed, subaltern groups.

In all the years you've taught in the US, given your personal history as a professor whose work is also implicitly that of a political activist, I'm interested to know whether you've found much satisfaction teaching in American universities with the increasing corporatization of education, and the sense that people come to school to just get their degrees. So, I wonder whether you've found satisfaction of a political dimension in this context, perhaps in terms of a kind of teaching that deepens and enriches your political convictions.

I will say something first with a little bit of bemusement: As I approach the age of 60, I realize with a tinge of regret that I've spent far more years within the walls of the university than in the outside world, and I'm very surprised by this. I taught for eleven years in Nigeria, and I'm now in my seventeenth, going to the eighteenth year in the US university system. If I had my way, it would have been the other way round. I must say that I love teaching; I get a great personal fulfillment in teaching, and I don't think I would have done any other job.

But I would have loved to combine teaching with involvement in the world beyond the walls of the university. To a certain extent I did that while I was in Nigeria, which was equally fulfilling. But all told, in my adult life, I've spent far many more years within the walls of the university than I have outside.

But having said that, I also have to admit to something that I have been able to acknowledge with an untroubled conscience only in the process of attaining maturity. This is the simple but profound fact that the human animal is both a political and a non-political being. There are certain promptings of the psyche and of the imagination that cannot and ought not to be reduced to the logic of politics, even of radical progressive politics. The human animal is so refractory, so complex that there are many dimensions that ought not to be reduced to the logic of politics. And it's for want of a better term that I have made this distinction between the political and the non-political, because I still believe that they are related in complex ways.

I've found out, just to give you an example, that there are writers who in terms of their politics, I detest tremendously, but what their writing does for me, is a different matter. One is the playwright of Greek antiquity, Aristophanes. The man wrote dramas savaging and making fun of the progressives of his day, people like Euripides and Socrates. Aristophanes was militantly conservative and for a self-confessed radical, you have to love the writing to keep reading him. Another example is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinean writer, in for instance The Book of Imaginary Beings. You know, Borges sided with the fascists, the generals in Latin America. But he's an extremely fascinating writer, as you know.

By extension, I find that in the classroom, and I say this with a bit of self-consciousness, the kind of wariness or even controlled combativeness I used to feel toward certain positions held by conservative students with overt or covert racist or sexist or xenophobic worldviews and attitudes has mellowed somewhat. I'm willing to reason with them, and subject all arguments, theirs and mine, to open discussions, and often find the process very fascinating.

As I have grown older, I find that I don't relate to people only and primarily on the basis of shared political beliefs and affiliations. I find that I respond to people, especially in terms of intellectual work, at different levels and different degrees of stimulating collaboration.

I use this particular point to go back to the more general contention that man is both a political and a non-political animal, and there are many predispositions of the psyche and imagination that are best regarded non-reductively. Moreover, without becoming unprincipled and cavalier, one should accept this fact and not subject it to the law of the reconciliation of antagonisms. So, that would be my response to the question about the relationship between my politics and the demands of my work as an academic. I try mightily to relate one to the other in a flexible manner, but if I pretended that there's a consistently logical relationship between both, I'd be lying.

So, the argument is that they are two different terrains, and if they come together, fine?

Usually, I try for them to come together, to be mutually reinforcing, but that hasn't always been the case. Initially in my earlier years, I tried as much as possible to make them dovetail with one another, but in my more mature years, while I hope I have tried to be as consistent as possible in my self-identification as a progressive academic, I've not tried to insist on a very rigid relationship between my politics and my teaching.

I've noticed, not necessarily with you, but with some of your colleagues that any time I tried to raise a question about your work in Ode-Omu, near Ile-Ife, in the late 1970s, there's always some kind of hesitancy, or unwillingness to discuss the matter. I've never understood this, and although I recall that you've talked generally about that particular time in the past, there's still much that remains unsaid about this important period. And quite significantly, some of you who were quite active in this project are still doing similar work in other directions, maybe on different templates, but without doubt with the same kind of self-confidence.

Well, let me frame it by way of two very different but somewhat related phenomena in developments within the left in Africa. One is the well-known case of the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o when he and his colleagues at the University of Nairobi built the Kamirithu Community Cultural Center, and put up theatrical productions, in Kamirithu. The initiative became threatening to the neocolonial state in Kenya, and they broke it up. The other example I want to draw upon from Nigeria to place your question in a broader context is the assassination of Bala Mohammed in Kano during the Second Republic. Not many people, especially in younger generations, knew precisely why Dr. Bala Mohammed was assassinated.

I always put it down to the work of reactionary politicians in the North.

Yes, but it was more precise than that. There was a particular reason for it, a relationship of cause-and-effect. It was because he began to use the Hausa language to reach the masses, on the radio. From what I heard, he was a very brilliant and effective user of the language, and he began to use it to reach the masses of people in the Hausa-speaking states, in this case, in Kano and Kaduna as the hub.

Bala Mohammed's Hausa-language broadcasts became so phenomenally successful that after the jumaat service on Fridays, people stayed by their radios and waited for Bala Mohammed. So, to the reactionaries he became a big threat and he had to be stopped.

The point I want to draw from this is, if you read Bode Sowande's play, Farewell to Babylon, if you remember that the central factor in the dramatic action of that play is the fact that a group of radical lecturers resigned from the university to join peasants and live and work in a rural community. Bode was drawing that from the kind of examples I've given, with Ngugi moving out of the university, and Bala Mohammed using Hausa to reach the masses and in the process becoming far more effective than he could have been in the classroom.

Now, what you say about the kind of legacy that you asked of me with regard to the Ode-Omu group belongs to that tradition, and all I can say is that, as of two months ago, I have begun to write my memoirs. In fact, one by-product is an essay I wrote specifically about my friendship with Femi Osofisan which I titled 'Friendship and the Revolutionary Ethos', as part of a book to mark his 60th birthday. The essay grew out of this new project to write my memoirs.

So, I think you're absolutely right, and to show how correct you're, let me add that the legacy of the Kamirithu Educational and Cultural Center has been written about extensively, both by Ngugi himself and by commentators worldwide. The case of Bala Mohammed is barely known, even in Nigeria.

Yes, I for one knew the real reasons for the first time today. I knew it was connected to the political disturbances of 1983, but I didn't know about the mass conscientization dimension.

That was the reason. It's barely known. So, you're right to say that for the continuity of the struggle about the past, the present, and the future, it's good to have a sense of the legacy of progressive struggles in Nigeria and worldwide. That's true. But we have to pay attention to why for instance the case of Ngugi is better known than that of Bala Mohammed. Because in the case of the phenomenon which produced Mohammed, it actually led to electoral politics for the first time in the history of Nigeria, of the progressive left winning state power, and doing important work. For instance, in the years when the PRP ruled in Kano and Kaduna, mass literacy was so deep-rooted and so extensive that they won several awards from the United Nations for doing unprecedented work in education and other matters. Land redistribution was another matter.

Yes, I remember that. Osofisan's play, Altine's Wrath, is about that.

Yes. So, why is it that the case of Bala Mohammed is not so well known? After Kamirithu was stopped, Ngugi went into exile, and that was the end of that project. After Mohammed was killed, the movement did not die. All the more reason it should be known. As you said, those of us involved in that project at Ode-Omu are alive and ought to write about it. I've started to write about it. But it's true that there's been a general reluctance to talk about it, and I think one important factor, never openly admitted by any of us, but implicitly understood by all, is that we have generally felt that it is only when people give up, whether wrongly or rightly, it is when people whose most passionate and idealistic dreams were not realized have given up the possibility of those dreams being realized, that they begin to write about it.

So, the writing becomes a way of realizing it . . .

Yes, vicariously, or at least as a way of explaining oneself to history, to future generations. But implicitly this has been a factor. Eddie (Madunagu) and I rarely ever talk about the Ode-Omu experience. There's an implicit understanding in this that when you begin to write your memoirs it's almost an admission of some sort. Again, with Ngugi, it's not exactly the case that he started writing when he realized that it was over; he was imprisoned, his life was threatened, and it became clear that the idea needed to be committed to paper, so that it's not lost forever. So, he had to safeguard that experience and protect it from the oblivion of history.

We have also laboured under that risk of oblivion, but apart from other exigencies, the Ode-Omu experience had some bitter defeats about it for all of us who were involved in it. That's also a factor, that there's a lot of great, unassuageable pain about unrealized hopes involved. That's particularly fraught for us to divulge too easily.

Originally published in The Guardian (Nigeria) on January 8, 2006.

Citation Format:

Akin Adesokan. “Conversation with Biodun Jeyifo,” West Africa Review: Issue 9, 2006.

Copyright © 2006 Africa Resource Center, Inc.