Yesterday, at the Music Society of Nigeria’s Agip Recital Hall, a splendid gathering celebrated Prof Biodun Jeyifo, more popularly known as BJ, on his 80th birthday which was highlighted by a brilliant lecture given by Prof Priya Gopal, one of his former students now of Cambridge University. A panel of four of his former students comprised of The Nation‘s Sam Omatseye, Kunle Ajibade of TheNEWS/PM News, Dr Bisi Anyadike, proprietess of Sunshine Nursery and Primary School, Ile-Ife, and yours truly, recounted the extremely rewarding experience of being taught by him.
In his remarks, Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi, childhood friend and chairman of the occasion, disclosed that BJ was not supposed to live to be 80, having been born with a genetic condition that took the life of his brother very early. When the trait was discovered in him, luckily he was in the USA and a medical intervention was partly responsible for saving him. Even more, his close friends and associates know that for the past two decades, he has battled renal failure, making his turning a full four-score years an absolute celebration of life.
Ogunbiyi read BJ’s airmail letter from London to him in 1969, which already showed a thoughtful and keenly observant intellectual. Right from the start, BJ broke all rules and always got in trouble. For instance, he would never plant and weed his bed for practical nature studies and got whipped each time. It got so bad Ogunbiyi offered to weed his bed and all that he had to do was show up for the inspection. He didnt and was whipped again!
At the dinner that capped the day’s events, BJ confessed that he didn’t know why he kept letting himself get punished — it wasn’t as if he enjoyed being caned — but that Ogunbiyi’s recently released memoirs,The River Never Forgets, clarified for him why he had been so rebellious in his youth, to the point of being dubbed later a “masochist” by Soyinka: he was then, he said, “angry without knowing why, a rebel without a cause.”
As is the wont at such gatherings, reminiscences soon led to the revelation of “secrets” or, let’s just say, embarrassing anecdotes. Such as Soyinka’s assertion that as a student, BJ was a disaster, that he was a Marxist but “not what I call a vulgar Marxist.” With BJ, he said, he found that it was possible not to be ideologically dogmatic, inflexible, especially as many of his fellow-travellers weren’t.
For his part, BJ said he had enlisted in a drama course at Ife just so as to have the pleasure of being taught by Soyinka. But his teacher-hero showed up only twice, so he famously accused him of not “being the greatest teacher” — and not “a bad teacher” as Soyinka had reported! Yet, Soyinka had personally invited him to cross from the English department to Dramatic Arts, to BJ’s exhilaration. Since then, the world can testify, the relationship between teacher and student has, simply put, matured like fine wine and flourished to the point of great mutual respect and admiration.
And such as the revelation of just two instances of BJ’s forgetfulness by Mrs Sade Ogunbiyi, childhood friend and age-mate (though BJ insists she call him Brother Biodun on account of being, BJ informed us, five months older). Once, he had forgotten fried fish sent by her to then boyfriend Yemi in the pockets of his jacket! And when the letter containing some money for her mother in Ibadan, sent through him while BJ was a post-graduate student at New York University, had been discovered as he unpacked his suitcase back in New York, even though BJ had indeed personally conveyed the loving daughter’s greetings!
BJ was the inaugural president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) when he was still at the University of Ife (later deservingly renamed after its founder, the reverred Obafemi Awolowo). During his pioneering tenure, he plotted the trajectory of the struggle for university autonomy, the emergence of the Tertiary Education Fund (TETFund) and whatever autonomy universities enjoy today in Nigeria.
As the lawyer and human rights activist Femi Falana, SAN, a former student, revealed, he fought against formidable odds to ensure that all the lecturers dismissed, and the students expelled or rusticated, by General Olusegun Obasanjo as military dictator in the afermath of the 1978 Free Education “jihad” led by the National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS) were reinstated.
On his 60th anniversary, I published a piece in West Africa journal entitled “For BJ at 60: A Student’s Random Recollections in Lieu of a Tribute” https://www.africaknowledgeproject.org/index.php/war/article/view/275. And a decade ago, I wrote another entitled “Learning at the Feet of a Benevolent Taskmaster (for BJ at 70)” https://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/01/learning-at-the-feet-of-a-benevolent-taskmaster-for-bj-at-70/, published by Premium Times under the title, “The Communist as Teacher: The Example of Biodun Jeyifo” https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2016/02/18/171231-2/?tztc=1.
May God guide and guard the inimitable, inspiring and generous, spirit known endearingly by young and old simply as BJ and grant him even more grace in his twilight years.
* Dr. Ogaga Ifowodo, a literary activist, is a Barrister-at-law based in Abuja
