The news of Hyeladzira Balami’s demise was devastating, to put it mildly. My eyes misted but I had to hold myself together. But the sad news was expected by those who were close to him. He had been sick for some time, hospitalized, and discharged to spend the last days of his life at home. His death was more devastating as he was relatively young despite being in his mid-sixties. He belonged to the generation of those born about Nigeria’s independence and who would grow up during military rule and corrupt civilian governance. I called him Hyeladzira, unlike most people who called him Balami. Hyeladzira was my student and junior colleague in the Department of English at the University of Maiduguri. He was also my mentee, great friend, and junior brother. He was one of those who helped to fashion my very positive impression of Maiduguri and Nigeria’s North. He was a Bura, a minority group, in the Biu area. He was a Christian.
Hyeladzira, as a colleague, was a member of our “gang” which included Captain Ben Abagyeh, Ben Oladele Akogun, Abubakar Othman, and me. We went to an outside drinking place in town many evenings and talked mostly about poetry and a little about Nigerian politics over soft drinks and isi-ewu. You can imagine bonding with Hyeladzira during work hours and after-office hours. He had a good sense of humor. He laughed a lot. Being a student and scholar of Stylistics, he was very knowledgeable in literature and language. He read wide. He played with words in a startling manner, often laughing in his unique ringing but low voice. He read and commented on my poems before I arrived at the final versions of my early poems. His innate talent shone through his own poems, other writings, comments, and editorial craft. He was generous in editing the works of those who sought his assistance in getting a clean copy of their writings.
Hyeladzira went to the University of Ibadan, my own alma mater, on study leave for graduate studies. He got the MA. However, this talented young man could not cope with his doctoral program. He suggested indirectly that his hard work was not enough to take him through the program, but that’s not my concern here. He was, I believe, the coeval of Professors Mabel Evwierhoma and Onookome Okome, among others, who acknowledge his intelligence.
Ibadan seems to have poured cold water into his desire for a doctoral degree and thus he returned with only his MA to the English Department in Maiduguri. He taught many students who would have Ph.D. and become lecturers and professors. He helped professors to revise and edit their literary articles for publication. He also helped postgraduate students with their theses and dissertations.
Hyeladzira attended the conferences organized in my honor at Delta State University, Abraka, and University of Port Harcourt, Port Harcourt, respectively. He was a dedicated and loyal friend. He visited me in Warri many times, and you could tell while there that he was not a Warri Boy. On one occasion, we were in Effurun and heard a gunshot close by. “Is that a gunshot or knockout?” he asked. Even before I could answer him, he was sauntering towards the source of the shot to find out what it was. I drew him backwards to leave the place immediately. When with me in Warri, sometimes he stayed out late. He was not scared but I was scared for him. He took life leisurely, felt every other person was harmless and compassionate as he was. He was too innocent and rather naïve for a Warri Boy, I told him. He did not understand that Warri was a jungle. That was before Boko Haram happened to Maiduguri!
I visited Maiduguri in July 2019 as a mark of solidarity with my colleagues and friends still there and who had shown so much resilience. Hyeladzira, Abubakar Othman, and Razinat Mohammed hosted me, and we had such a good time. That visit showed me that Hyeladzira was always Hyeladzira. On our excursion to the Markas, he drove me and Othman. At one point he was going into lonely dark alleys of bullet-ridden walls, and we called him to order. He was fearless to a fault. We physically stopped him and turned back to the main road. We all wrote poems on the incident. In his poem he called us cowards and we responded that it was not worth it to bait danger. Our dialogic poems are in the anthology of poems inspired by Boko Haram, which we, Razinat Mohammed, Abubakar Othman, Hyeladzira Balami, and I edited: The Markas: An Anthology of Literary Works on BOKO HARAM (Lagos: Malthouse Press, 2019).
Hyeladzira would not miss out on whatever I invited him to. He came late to my mother’s burial ceremony. That was Hyeladzira! He said he was confused about the date, but that did not matter as he set out for Okurekpo, my mother’s village in Delta State. Returning to Abuja, I visited him at his brother’s place. He could not make it to my wife’s 70th birthday anniversary, but he made sure his brother represented him. I invited him to spend time with me last May/June in Abuja. He promised he would try to come but laughed and I couldn’t interpret his laughter.
Hyeladzira wrote very good poetry which I got a publisher to accept to publish, if he arranged the poems orderly and wrote a preface. Hyeladzira would not and his poems remained not put together in a collection. It seemed to me that he was losing interest in many things. He resisted efforts to persuade him to do the doctorate degree either in the Department at the University of Maiduguri or elsewhere. Our common friend, Silas Obadiah, told me he even said that I was more interested in his having a Ph.D. than he was! I left him as a genius who saw no benefit in a formal Ph.D. I still expected him to surprise me with a book of his beautiful poems, but he must have felt it did not matter having such a higher degree or a book of poems.
I called him when he was in hospital and asked what was wrong with him. He told me laughing that it was the prevailing hardship in the country. It is true things are still hard in the country. However, unlike his known mischievous but cheerful laughter, this response sounded hollow and weak. Hyeladzira suffered from the Nigerian dis-ease!
Hyeladzira Balami died during the apocalyptic flood that hit Maiduguri from heavy downpours and the collapse of the Lake Alau Dam. What a pathetic fallacy! He was brilliant, kind, loyal, and good as a human being could be. However, his intelligence was not fully rewarded. As an udje song asks, if the moon does not shine well, who will go to the sky to put it right? His death is an inconsolable loss.
* Professor Tanure Ojaide is an award-winning Nigerian poet, novelist and academic