By Jeff Godwin Doki Ph. D
‘Sometimes only one person is missing and the whole world seems depopulated’. In these words, Alphonse De Lamartine (1790-1869), that French author, poet, statesman and critic, once captured the irreplaceability of great men when they take their exit on the stage of life.
Lamartine’s statement has the terseness and cogency that we have come to associate with tragedy. But more than tragedy, the statement sets before us a truth about human life and the incalculable, almost immeasurable, achievements certain individuals could bequeath to humanity before the bell tolls for them.
Biodun Jeyifo (or BJ for short) who died in Ibadan on 11th February, 2026, was one of those multi-profiled prodigies whose achievements are difficult to count and impossible to pigeon-hole.
Undoubtedly, Biodun Jeyifo’s presence in the world of African letters, and more generally, in African intellectual circles, is a commanding and venerable one. As a literary critic, public intellectual and cultural theorist, BJ belongs to that category of scholars many have dubbed as ‘Race Men’, this being intellectuals whose lifework consisted primarily in the elucidation and affirmation of the traditions of thought, imagination and the spirit of Africa and its diasporas. As a literary scholar, BJ’s fame grew like the proverbial wild fire and spread through Africa and beyond because of his trenchant analysis of capitalist modernity and its social and cultural crisis. In this regard, BJ ranks with other famed post-colonial scholars like Homi Babha, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Ngugi wa Thiong’O and Bill Ashcroft.
What all these critics and writers have in common is the elucidation of the day-to-day realities of more than three quarters of the World’s population that have had their lives shaped by the experiences of colonialism. Another way of putting this is to say that BJ’s scholarship is primarily concerned with exposing and foregrounding the tensions with the imperial power and emphasizing the differences from the assumptions of the imperial center.
In order to do this successfully, BJ devoted great skill in carrying out research on the works of the first generation of African writers, especially Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. Perhaps, some words about Soyinka and Achebe may be insightful. A feeling generally exists in African literary circles that Soyinka is a poet who does not offer himself so easy comprehension. According to this view, Soyinka’s thoughts and sentiments are inherently difficult. As a writer, between 1960 and 1962, Soyinka used a Rockfeller Foundation Research Fellowship to collect and study Yoruba folk drama.
This study greatly enriched Soyinka’s plays like A Dance of the Forest and Kongi’s Harvest. This study is also responsible for the myths, proverbs and chant-like rhythms in his poetry and plays.
But again, Soyinka is not influenced by Yoruba culture alone. He is also very much acquainted with Christian and Western literary traditions. The fact is that Soyinka came into contact with the Bible and Christianity in his elementary and secondary school days. In his writings, therefore, there are many Biblical allegories, allusions and references.
And closely related to Biblical allusions is Soyinka’s deep knowledge of Western literature. Soyinka seems to be versed from Classicism to Modernism. His knowledge and passion for drama brought him into contact with Greek and European dramatists. The Greek dramatists (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes) particularly appealed to Soyinka because of the similar attitude to gods and tragedy. It is therefore not surprising that in his poetry as well as his plays, Soyinka makes references to Greek gods especially Dionysus, Osiris and Zeus while at the same time comparing them to Yoruba gods like Sango, Obatala, Ogun and Esu.
Soyinka is therefore a versatile and voracious reader of Western literature. At the same time, he has a deep awareness of Yoruba culture. It is his use of myths and Western literary allusions that makes him obscure to the reader unfamiliar with his native world picture. In his works of art, therefore, we find a synthesis of African and European cultures in which the local is universalized and the universal simultaneously localized. The difficulty in understanding Soyinka’s writings must be understood from this background.
Now, this difficulty in Soyinka’s works is precisely the point where every scholar of African literature shall come before BJ with some sort of genuflection. While the early and leading scholars on Soyinka,,especially Eldred Jones, Robert Fraser, Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa and Madubuike, took the view that the difficulties and complexities in Soyinka’s body of works were either merely self -constitutive or willfully obscurantist, BJ , on the other hand, expressed the view that modernist and avant-garde techniques and language were at the heart of the alleged difficulties and complexities.
BJ’s award-winning book Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism (2004) is today regarded as the most comprehensive study on Wole Soyinka and the most sophisticated single author study of any writer in African postcolonial studies. Besides Soyinka, BJ also wrote extensively about Chinua Achebe (the father of the African novel) in the early 1990s elucidating a new ideological and theoretical perspective not previously considered by other critics. But more than that, BJ’s teaching, research and publications in the 1970s through the 1980s were pivotal in transforming the curriculum of Nigerian universities. In this unprecedented development, Marxist literary, theater and cultural studies as well as Marxist philosophy and historiography became incorporated in the university curriculum.
Furthermore, BJ was a member of a group of English Department at Cornell university that gave free weekly classes to inmates at the all-male maximum security correctional facility of Auburn in New York where the writings and thoughts of anti-colonial scholars like Frantz Fanon, Amical Cabral, Nelson Mandela and Chinua Achebe were taught as subjects.
In Nigeria, BJ taught at the University of Ibadan (1975-1977) and the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University 1977-1987). Then, he taught for one year (1987-1988) at Oberlin College Ohio before moving to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York where he taught from 1989 to 2006 in the English department. Thereafter, he moved to Harvard University in 2006 in the department of Comparative Literature and African and African American studies departments. He retired in 2019. In all these institutions BJ invested a lot of intellectual and moral capital in working very closely with undergraduate students, graduate students and younger colleagues.
Away from the literati, BJ made significant contributions to ASUU (Academic Staff Union of Universities) as its third national president from 1980 to 1982. Here again, it is important to put the records straight. BJ was never the first president of ASUU as it is popularly reported in most quarters. The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) grew out of the Nigerian Association of University Teachers (NAUT) founded in 1965. At that time , NAUT had five universities in Nigeria as its members namely the University of Ibadan, University of Nigeria Nsukka, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, University of Ife, Ile-Ife and University of Lagos. The major objective of NAUT was mainly for the improvement of the conditions of service of its members and for the socio-economic and political well-being of Nigeria. In other words, NAUT had no clear-cut ideology. When ASUU was founded out of NAUT in 1978, Prof I. O. Agbede was its first president from 1977 to 1978. He was followed by Dr. B.A. Ogundimu from 1979 to 1980. Prof Biodun Jeyifo was its third president from 1980 to 1982.
As president of ASUU, BJ transformed ASUU from a nascent organization into a formidable union, focusing on building sustainable structures to safeguard academic freedom and workers’ rights. BJ was a Marxist scholar and activist with an unquenchable commitment for the emancipation of the poor and a distaste for the exploitation of one class by another especially in modern industrial capitalism. In this regard, BJ came to represent the black radical’s anti-imperialist voice and tradition, he represented the black radical’s increasing commitment to justice, freedom and human rights, he represented the black radical’s revolutionary humanist political vision and theories of social change. In BJ, therefore, could be found a combination of the political activist, social organizer, cultural worker or what the Italian critical theorist, Antonio Gramsci, grandly calls the ‘organic intellectual’. Furthermore, BJ was one of the most clamorous advocates of a free society in which the truth would be placed in the service of national liberation and the construction of a social order that shall favor the mass urban workers and rural producers at the base of the socio-economic pyramid in Africa. BJ’s life-long slogan was that: ‘We must not abandon our people, the oppressed and the under-privileged’.
Moreover, BJ’s leadership of ASUU was marked by courage, strategic clarity, and an unwavering belief in the importance of scholars standing together to defend the integrity of their work. It could be perceived that BJ’s leadership of ASUU set some standards that have endured till today, with a focus on institutional integrity and academic freedom. As ASUU President, BJ championed rigorous scholarship, insisted on high standards of evidence and argument, and resisted intellectual fashion. Most importantly, BJ nurtured younger scholars, offering guidance with characteristic humility, and encouraged critical thinking and intellectual honesty.
Over and above all, BJ was a very important and extraordinary man, a staunch defender of justice and human rights, a dependable comrade, uncommonly courageous, principled and consistent. It is no surprise that BJ deserves to have been better known in Nigeria and Africa, a continent always close to his heart. BJ was a versatile thinker and activist, a highly principled humanist and revolutionary critic who brought life and hope to mankind. And to conclude with the words of Niyi Osundare, the Nigerian poet, people like BJ never die, they are always there in our ‘spheres of existence’.
Good bye, great scholar, mentor and teacher.
*Jeff Godwin Doki is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Jos (UNIJOS) Nigeria