TEACHING AS ACTIVISM: BJ AT 60

WEST AFRICA REVIEW

ISSN: 1525-4488

Issue 9 (2006)

Chima Anyadike

Birthday anniversaries are occasions for celebrating the lives we have been given and, if we are old enough, reflecting on what we have done with them. Some members of the academic community in Nigeria and abroad may remember and join the family, friends, students and other well-wishers of Professor Biodun Jeyifo, popularly known as BJ, as they celebrate with him his 60 years of existence on earth.

One likely birthday wish of these friends and admirers for BJ is that this should turn out to be only mid-morning yet on his creation day, to borrow from Chinua Achebe's title of his collection of essays. This is why some may feel as I do, that we have to wait for the ripeness of time for the full appreciation of the ways BJ's life has positively impacted on not only other personal lives, but the intellectual and social life of both the academic and non-academic communities in which he has lived. What follows, therefore, are only a few remarks that come from a quick peep into his active and prodigious life. They may contain some inaccuracy, but are nevertheless offered as an attempt to give a general sense of what has been going on and the kinds of harvests being built up and disseminated from it.

The radical approach to teaching and learning and a serious interrogation of the dominant goals of university education in Nigeria got a new impetus from a younger crop of intellectuals at the universities of Ibadan and Ife in the 70s and 80s. At student rallies, symposia, conferences, invited lectures, classroom discussions in all disciplines, students were constantly being educated on why university education should not just be about spending four or more years on campuses, acquiring skills that best equip them to function well in a capitalist economy that rewards them for compliance with a treadmill and humdrum life of the middle class.

There was a ferment of ideas and a fore-grounding and popularisation of the Marxist idea that perhaps that life can be become more exciting and even more fulfilling if it is devoted to dismantling the structures of privileged and oppression built by a few so that the society can be transformed by values of equal opportunities and an equitable system of rewards for everyone. BJ was one of those young intellectuals.

Starting from Ibadan, BJ moved on to Ife and after a brief experiment of living in a commune to form a core of revolutionaries with people like Seinde Arigbede, an unsung hero of that period, he joined other Marxist-oriented scholars like Dipo Fasina, Idowu Awopetu, Toye Olorode, G.G. Darah to form a strong base for leftist thought and praxis with a link to other intellectuals on the left like Eddie Madunagu and Bala Usman in other locations.

As a student at Ife in those days, I was unable to convert to Marxism. I remain very uncomfortable with cant and propaganda which I heard and read a lot of. But I began to see that whatever ideology I lived by also has its cant and propaganda. This was largely due to how BJ brought to bear on his discussions and lectures, a special brilliance of mind that went beyond catch-phrases and was as far and wide in its reference points as it was profound in its analytical rigour.

With him as our teacher, the study of literature became for me and some other students, no longer just a good critical analysis of literary texts, written in good prose in response to the questions posed by examiners. It literally became a window that opens up into our society, laying bare in the literary works, the human processes that make us who we are and with intimations of how we can, with the knowledge acquired from a careful reflection on what we see, become and help others to become better fulfilled human beings. It became clear to me then, that Marxism may not be the only tool with which to transform our society, but that it can be one good tool when it is properly used. BJ personified for me at that time, one good example of how it may be used.

It was therefore not surprising that he took the same quality of mind to meetings of university teachers and that he was elected the first president of the restructured and re-energised National Association of University Teachers, which under his leadership, became the dreaded Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and brought the university teachers as a group, out of the ivory tower into serious political discourse as it relates to university education in Nigeria.

At the level of his home department at Ife, it certainly was not business as usual. Professor Ogunba is no Marxist, but he must have been affected by the Marxist ambience in Ife the way I was, especially as he would participate in the on-going debates. Under his leadership, a Department of Literature in English was created from the Department of English Studies so that it can properly face the challenges of decolonising the teaching of Literature by removing the emphasis on English Literature as the core of literary studies.

BJ and other Marxist oriented scholars in the department played crucial roles in that struggle. His introduction of the Ife Monograph Series as the acting head of department, coupled with the inputs of these other scholars like G.G. Darah, into the activities and leadership of ASUU in Ife, soon began to attract both scholarly and governmental attention both nationally and internationally to the department. Nobody in the Department of English both before and after BJ left there 20 years ago, has nurtured and produced as many PhDs as he did.

Conservative forces both at Ife and the seat of government in Lagos soon went into swift action: the young and promising department was abolished and its members were reabsorbed into the English department "as is the case in other universities."

When BJ decided in response to complex pressures to move on to the United States, not just for "a year in the first instance" some of his comrades, colleagues, friends and students understandably felt betrayed because the decision appeared irreconcilable with the direction his life had taken up to that point. One explanation he offered, to the effect that the work to be done has international dimensions best understood and engaged by being out there, appeared to be self-serving. However, in the last twenty years, BJ has lived and worked in the best universities in the United States, including Cornell and Harvard; he has, during then period, effectively influenced the direction of postcolonial discourse, extended and deepened his engagement with Soyinka and other developing world's literature and politics. In all of these, BJ appears to be enlarging, even as he sharpens his Marxist view of life and society, continuously adding in the process, to his stature as a public intellectual.

As Biodun Jeyifo turns 60, one thing appears clear: Nigeria in particular, and the academic world in general, have not heard the last or the best from him. We wish him well.

Originally published in The Guardian (Nigeria), Friday January 13, 2006

Citation Format:

Chima Anyadike. “Teaching as Activism: BJ at 60,” West Africa Review: Issue 9, 2006.