This was very much a counter discourse, in terms of thematic intent, to the highly elevated theoretical performance in his book The TRUTHFUL LIE: ESSAYS IN A SOCIOLOGY OF AFRICAN DRAMA. These were books that were clearly inadequate representations of the larger than life image that he had acquired as a radical academic whose reputed versatility and seductive rigor preceded him into every forum. What may well be added is that the volume of BJ’s performance was not to be accounted for in the publish or perish syndrome of the Academy but the influence and power of his production across not just the Nigerian University system but across the African studies programmes all over the world. His intervention in theory at this stage was concise: it was a statement of the necessity to view tragedy not as a matter of Aristotalean fixities nor the dialectics of Hegel’s idealistic conception of history but one that following Karl Marx, overturned the dialectic to emboss the will of the underprivileged as self-conscious agents in history. Self-consciousness was very much the issue. But it was approached from a standpoint that made social movements coincident with bringing a socialist society or at least a close approximation of such a society into being.

Meanwhile, building organizations that would help to sustain the intellectual pursuits of the progressive kind was part of the BJ problematique. Unlike the Positive Review group which was merely a more sensational but inchoate attempt at building the means for pursuing the ideological goal, there were other less well known designs for intervention in the social arguments in the society which were supposed to grow from little acorns, as they say, into oaks. In a society where there is hardly a tradition of building civic and civil organizations for durability, the angling for the establishments of lasting movements that can embody and propel the aspirations of underprivileged groups has been a problem. Between his movement from the University of Ibadan to Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, and then his Presidency of ASUU, BJ was literally consumed by the need to confront the question of agency, a movement that could link the socialist message to the historical agency of the workers, peasants and other progressive classes in the society.

It is of significance, in this respect, that the insertion of ASUU as a factor within the workers movement in Nigeria began with his leadership. Hitherto, the average university teacher was stand-offish towards the working class movement. The graduate was an automatic member of the civil service entitled to all the visuals of the ruling class, members of the administrative class in the civil service, closeted within the ivory tower and shielded from the suffering masses by a code of academic freedom that distinguished gown from town. That was until the military class, erupting into power, acclimatizing as world-changers with immediate effect, and getting ever so touchy about being denizens of a semi-literate institution, simply could not brook the alternative source of power that universities provided. Determined to reduce the arrogance of the professors, whose students over-reached themselves too often by criticizing and mounting demonstrations and protests against military authorities, the military administrations forced the academics to eat humble pie. It was dated by some maverick folklorist as beginning from the day General Yakubu Gowon took the cap from the head of Oritsejolomi Thomas, fully attired in academic gown, as Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan and proceeded to use it as a begging bowl to collect donations at a convocation fund-raiser. Soon enough came the trauma of the Professors being ordered to clear out of their secure abodes on campus for daring to go on strike.

They began to be treated worse than the civil service. Yes, the universities came under the civil service in ways that could never sit well with the old concept of academic freedom. To have to battle for their very lives was not something that the university don considered part of the business of lecturing. But the militariat induced them to see it that way. It took a Marxist to make them see that unless they organized in the manner of the trade unions, there was not a chance of their being able to stand up for themselves. Better, unless they were affiliated with the national trade union movement, their effectiveness within the system would be easily blunted. Linking the brains of the ivory tower to the brawn and muzzle of the working class movement was a novelty in Nigerian affairs that needed to be invented because it did not yet exist. The alliance, as it was, soon proved too dangerous for the powers that be.

There was already such a ferment in the Nigerian University system that can still be imagined today: Think of the class of academics: Billy Dudley, Ojetunji Aboyade, Wole Soyinka, Ayodele Awojobi, MJC Echeruo, Bala Usman, Ola Oni, Bade Onimode, Akin Mabogunje, Emmanuel Obiechina, Chinua Achebe, Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie, The Professors Awe, and so many others whom we must now see as avatars of the Academy. They formed the backbone of an academic and intellectual tradition that once seemed capable of lasting forever. With the student population pumped up with a knowledge of their civic efficacy, and making demands that were increasingly anathematized by military dictatorship, there was clearly a basis for worrying about the power that the masses would pool if the working class was organized to stand with the Academy. The minders of the system were frightened of young people who could ask questions. But they were more frightened of an alliance between them and those who had experiences to weigh against the system.

The dictatorships would rather that the students were turned into heady mischief makers and spoilers of unionism and enemies of the sense of solidarity that comes from seeing the country as a common property. This was the season when University people began to be sacked for teaching what they were not paid to. The future of the Nigerian University and of not just radical but liberal politics in Nigeria was slated for muzzling. It took place in the context of the death of the Lagos Plan of Action, as the government, riddled by debt peonage, was being induced, among other African states in the grip of structural adjustment programmes, to reduce sponsorship of Nigerian Universities. It was indeed the ruination of the intellectual class whose exodus to foreign havens began in the first trickles that soon became a flood. It was openly presented, by government spin doctors, as a favour done to the political economy. By the time BJ left for the United States, it was clear that his position was under life-threatening assaults. It bears mentioning in this regard that the decision to leave Nigeria was one that trailed and still trails a wealth of controversies.

There was already such a ferment in the Nigerian University system that can still be imagined today: Think of the class of academics: Billy Dudley, Ojetunji Aboyade, Wole Soyinka, Ayodele Awojobi, MJC Echeruo, Bala Usman, Ola Oni, Bade Onimode, Akin Mabogunje, Emmanuel Obiechina, Chinua Achebe, Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie, The Professors Awe, and so many others whom we must now see as avatars of the Academy. They formed the backbone of an academic and intellectual tradition that once seemed capable of lasting forever. With the student population pumped up with a knowledge of their civic efficacy, and making demands that were increasingly anathematized by military dictatorship, there was clearly a basis for worrying about the power that the masses would pool if the working class was organized to stand with the Academy. The minders of the system were frightened of young people who could ask questions. But they were more frightened of an alliance between them and those who had experiences to weigh against the system

Should he or should he not have gone to the United states in the face of the emasculation that the military hierarchy was so evidently primed to mete out to the opposition especially its academic arm? I shall leave the answer to the very end of this intervention. What cannot be denied is that, given the traduced nature of the Nigerian University system and the systematic dismantling of the structures that sustained qualitative academic production, he would certainly have had to abandon so much of what goes today as his intellectual work if he had remained. That work indeed needs to be assessed in its own right.

Denizen of the Fourth Stage

Surely, a Marxist who situates himself as a reader of animistic phases, a historical materialist who must operate in a world where the elimination of history from centrality has become both a national pastime and a world-class phenomenon valorized in the age of post-modernism and globalization, is a rare breed. As a farmer of alternative consciousness, he is either moving against the tide or enacting self-denial as a means of coping with fate. Thus, challenged to celebrate the interpreter, I find myself in the unenviable position of those pai de santos, the Babalawo of the new world orishas in Brazil, knowers of what is here, below and above our side of the metaphysical divide, who were asked to determine the patron god of Umberto Eco, the Italian semiotician, and now, best-selling novelist. As no one needs to be told, the semiotician comes from the country that is the domicile of the Roman Catholic Pontiff.

He is the product of a very rationalist enlightenment conundrum that covers Thomas Aquinas and Galileo, Hegel and Marx and Nietzche and Kierkegard, Betrand Russell and all the other doubters of faiths and questioners of paradigms. So to say, he is supposed to belong to another world, one that does not recognize or mis-recognizes the ontological status and validity of the orishas. For Umberto Eco, as readers of his Essays in Hyper-reality can attest, it was a matter of epistemological or disquisitional sport. He just wanted to know his own orisha. He was only too aware that pai de santos, the Babalawo, whether in Oshogbo, Urhonigbe, Ketu, Havana or Brasilia belong to a highly over-otherized alternative world view, an animistic bastion that bridged phenomena and epiphenomena, past present and future from a common umbilicus. He was expecting to wrong-foot the heirarchy of animists by taking the same question from one Babalawo to another. But all of them gave him the same answer: he belonged to Oxala, or what the average Yoruba animist would call Obatala in the manner that either a Soyinka or my father, the motor mechanic and game hunter, would claim the patronage of Ogun. Umberto Eco would not know what to make of his Obatala provenance. But he was sufficiently overcome by the animistic coda of the orishas to have found a place for Afro-Latin deities in his novelistic fabulations.

I want to engage my celebration of Biodun Jeyifo by insisting that like Umberto Eco, he has a place in the thought system that he would not, on firm ideological grounds, claim as his forte. Like Umberto Eco, an interpreter, Biodun Jeyifo has been such a consummate interpreter of our literature and our society that it is not so much what he says he wishes to do that excites but how he has affected all of us in the process. A difference does exist between the two. As for me, I want to say that I have come to view him from standpoints that I have only managed to work out after years of groping for a handle with which to react to the many ideological fashions that have mauled our spaces.

BJ happens to be one unflinching interpreter of our literature whose central production has been to engage WS, the most challenging writer that African literature produced in the twentieth into the twenty first century. He has operated from a standpoint that on the surface was an alternative angle to the reality that Soyinka himself mythologized. In one of his pieces, he actually talked about having Soyinka demythologized. To do this he had himself to enter the real Dance of the Forest. The jury is still out as to whether Biodun Jeyifo came out intact from the process. The tendency is that when you enter the forest it takes you over. In the process of pursuing Soyinka, BJ, I believe, has been completely taken over by the the Dance of the Forest. So much so that it is unfair to assess BJ without reference to it. It is impossible to understand the work that BJ has done so far, whether on Soyinka’s works or the other skirmishes that have yielded his most seminal work, unless you are prepared to situate him within the ambit of that hermeneutic frame that begins with accepting that animism is not just a religious conundrum, not a mere alternative to either a Christian or Muslim approach to metaphysics but a distinct approach to interpretation and management science. I have argued this in my piece In Search of Ogun: Soyinka Inspite of Nietzche. Here I will merely present a sketch for the purpose of revealing the implacable seduction that Biodun Jeyifo has had to contend with in the process of seeking to interprete the poet of Ogun and his animistic tropes.

In order to get into the mindset, yes it is a mindset that makes it possible to appreciate the transition from your regular sense of trope to the animistic, I would suggest that you do not need to do anything extraordinary. It begins with acknowledging that the business of interpretation starts with accepting it as an entrenched human right to ask questions in order to acquire knowledge. That was why the old philosophers talked about the pursuit of knowledge in terms of a presupposition-less enquiry. For it to make sense, it had to assume a generous presumption of inter-subjective appreciation of reality. It deferred faith on the basis of pooling of knowledge from wherever possible. For it to work, as interpretation, we are obliged to take on and to secularize the terms of Soyinka’s four archetypes. They are to be seen from the standpoint of the pursuit of synthesis, that is the recreation of the original oneness that was lost when that mythical slave Atunda smashed the head of the First One, Orisanla and created splinters, each of which became a god, fracturing wisdom and making the task of knowledge-acquisition a matter of patching together so many disparate fretworks of the same godhead.

Of course, every god you can think of according to this narrative is an incomplete being with ambitions to approximate the original godhead. Soyinka asserts the larger flint of the godhead for his own patron god, Ogun. We do not have to dispute it to accept that with so many incomplete gods around, the problem of knowledge, wisdom, centers on painstaking matching of phenomena and epiphenomena. If Ogun, the master of will, the pathbreaker is the most approximate, we have the other who sets the rules of engagement or seeks to discover the laws, the bureaucratic ethos that enable the survival of structures which help us to practice memory. Beyond the rule-governed framework is the necessity to solve problems, the very purpose for which knowledge in human society gains so much centrality.

As Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard reminds us, human beings tend to lose the power to solve problems when they lose the power of self-enjoyment, call it narcissism, love of music or the libidinal quest. What counts is that the gods that match each of these ways of dealing with the world are merely alter egos for practices of interpretation and management which ultimately bring together the past the present and the future in ways that attempt to create a region in which division, arising from the splintering of the original oneness, is resolved. Soyinka, following one of his two most determinate masters, Nietzche, the other being DO Fagunwa, calls it the chthonic realm or the Fourth Stage. The resolution that his chthonic realm constitutes is neither in the past or in a determinate present or future. But it is the ambition of all knowledge to arrive there. Why not the interpreter seeks to take us there, to have a synthesis amidst disparate orders and phenomena.

I want to argue that this will to synthesize, to enact laws or discover rules that govern things, is a problem-solving propensity that drives the knowledge curve, comes to its apogee in a pleasure principle, a narcissistic, self-luxuriating order. It is the ultimate somatic drive of Being when it abnegates pain for self and others and seduces activity accordingly. I do not make the claim that all interpreters are seduced by these archetypal performances in the same measure. But I would say the more an interpreter or analyst engages existence or aspects of it with consciousness of the archetypes, the less cornered he or she will be by the venting of sheer mysticism or what the sarcastic would call mumbo jumbo. To the rationalist, the animistic trope is a fount of mumbo jumbo. This is the way that BJ ought to be required to view it from his Marxist perspective. But not so fast. Biodun Jeyifo, our B.J., is bracketed in popular memory as the once and future Marxist interpreter and assessor of Soyinka’s hegemonic animism and of African literature and society who will not ignore the “tumult of rainstorm, thunder and lightning totally out of season” as “a passage rite preternaturally appropriate to the transition” of Duro Ladipo, the contemporary incarnation of Sango”.

I have argued that although not meaning to give over-weaning credence to this animist intimation… Jeyifo … gives a clear circumstantial accommodation to the personage of the god, as a ghost in the machine of Soyinka’s aesthetics”. In a world of so many gods of incompleteness, we know he knows where to find what cannot yet be explained, but he has interpreted, within the paradigm that he forswears. He is too conscious of it to disavow in wholesale fashion, critical areas outside the reach of his Marxist hermeneutics. Of course, in that rarefied zone – full of gods and epiphanies – we know in whose company we shall always find our comrade, breaking down barriers and luxuriating in the knowledge that human beings tend to lose the power to solve problems when they lose the power of self-enjoyment. Biodun Jeyifo always had that power. It was what he was fighting so hard not to lose when he did the exit-taking that found him in the United States at a time when there was so much to do at home to bring up a new generation of activists and fighters for a just and better society. It was an exit taking, that in reality was also a homecoming to being always in the same place with his society. The work he has done away from the homeland, and the work he is doing, attests to it. So why not! Let’s celebrate.