Unfortunately however, on our continent, such persons who are so acutely sensitive to the suffering of others are doomed to have a busy wailing time. Because the authors of our people’s misery are powerful, and in positions of power, these caring philanthropists will sooner or later find themselves condemned to a career of conflict and unending agitation. If they are stubborn and not easily daunted, these self-elected saviours of the legion of the poor will become vulnerable targets before our vicious leaders and their armed, conniving agents.
It will be tedious to begin to catalogue again here all the tragedies that the bulk of our people experience daily, since they have been abundantly written about. We can just summarize the story by saying that, ever since the birth of our country in the early 20th century under British colonialism, and especially even more severely since our gaining political independence in 1960, our people have not experienced any prolonged period of bliss. Every year, whether under military or civilian rulers, the few rich have continued to get richer, through brazen stealing and expropriation, and the poor grow more wretched.
BJ was one of those who realized early in his career that if this exploitation of our people by their own leaders is to stop, then the people must be mobilized. Boldly he accepted to play an active role in this needed work of mobilization. And the first step naturally was to reconcile his own inner differences.
9)
The truth is that a potentially shattering antinomy lies between, on the one hand, a volition to escape into the shelter of open spaces— into the anonymity of road and sea and skies—culling from them an inebriating treasury of self-replenishing energies; and, on the other, a no less compulsive empathy for the plight of the downtrodden, plus the courage to take corrective action to mend it.
To resolve the contradiction, BJ took a cue from the fabled visionaries of myth and history—the long line of heroes that stretch from Ogun and Orunmila to Awo and Zik, Nkrumah and Cabral, Lenin and Mao and Castro, and others of their ilk, etc. He decided to align his wanderlust with political activism, linking traveling bug with, as he himself puts it, “the great tasks of building a humane, just and egalitarian community in our country and our world” [APR: 546].
It was towards the actualization of this vision that BJ became a trade unionist. And in a sense, it was a measure of the success of this altruistic mission that his last birthday was not only an intriguing gathering of dreamers and activists, (plus the random anarchist), but also that the celebration turned to be a festive masque between the living and the dead, between ghosts with dirges on their tongues, and others with resurgent anthems.
BJ’s most glorious moment, it is safe to conclude, must therefore be traced back to those days in the early 1980s when he headed the Academic Staff Union of the Universities (ASUU), the now famous (or notorious?) union of teachers in the tertiary institutions.
As the pioneer president, you can imagine that BJ had a tremendous challenge before him to mobilize his colleagues dispersed all over the vast nation in various towns, and at a period too when the digital telephony was at its infancy, and the cell phone had only recently been invented.
The only option available to the fledgling Union then was to acquire a vehicle and send its officers by road to these various institutions. These would have to be dispatched from its secretariat at Ibadan to destinations as far away and scattered as Sokoto, Zaira and Maiduguri in the north, and Nsukka, Calabar and Port Harcourt in the south. It was, as you can well imagine, a most ambitious and hazardous undertaking, given the vast distances that had to be covered, and the fact that our roads, as attested to by innumerable fatal accidents, were virtual death traps.
For BJ, the challenge was not even as straightforward however. In retrospect, I think the way it worked out in his mind was that it was more akin to the situation of our traditional societies in the distant past, when the people faced a dire crisis, and were rescued from desperation only through the intervention of a ritual scapegoat.
To everyone’s surprise, therefore, BJ announced, like the sacred carrier of old, that he would be the Union’s lone emissary. Furthermore, he would drive himself on these journeys, and not take along the official driver that the Union had hired for the purpose. And finally, he would not allow the Union to purchase any other car to take him on the mission than a Volkswagen Beetle! A death wish, or a singular act of chivalry?
Against all opposition, BJ stood his ground, thus reviving for us the ancient code of leadership as a pledge of honour, valour and self-sacrifice, the morality code that has sadly long been jettisoned. BJ not only survived, but succeeded too in welding the teachers into a formidable army against the rampaging soldiers that had taken power over the country. ASUU became more or less like a Party of Opposition, the only contrary voice that the military, despite its brutal and awesome powers, found it hard to completely suppress.
10)
BJ survived, but it was also on those perilous roads that he found contentment. For the first time, he could marry his lust for travel with his inclination for political engagement, on a mission that was dangerous all right, but which put his capacity for stealth and cunning, as well as his organizational skill, to the maximum test.
Many years afterwards, as he recaptures the experience, one can still catch the thrill of the adventure in his voice: “I drove myself everywhere in the country without the driver by my side… I went on short and very long trips endlessly, week after week, month after month. The call of the road, which is elemental, and seems like a force of nature, fused with the great tasks of political and ideological mobilization, themselves often volcanic and transcendental in their impulses and energies….” (APR: 544)
And he continues, instructively: “My love of travelling, my deep, subliminal response to the call of the road was thoroughly mediated by accountability to communities and interests much bigger than myself.” (APR: 546).
This is BJ for you. He plunged with all his soul into this struggle to free and feed the masses, and to reverse their long history of exploitation. It is a pity that thus far, for obvious reasons, the full story of that struggle has not been written, nor of BJ’s involvement with other radical groups. One day, hopefully, all will be revealed, and due homage paid. For as he repeatedly asserts in his Talakawa Liberation Couriers, “The traveller, if he or she is lucky, always returns home.”
BJ’s most astute move, in my opinion, was to have led ASUU into a strategic alliance with the national labour movement, the NLC. He had read the situation correctly and seen that, without such affiliation a partisan organization like ASUU stood little chance against the formidable arsenal of the military establishment. Similarly, the labour organization too would continue to be frail and vulnerable unless it strengthened its intellectual capability in an alliance with the academic union.
As we all proudly recollect, this alliance did come about under BJ’s leadership, though, regrettably, it did not last long after him. But it is on the nation’s record that he is thus far the only ASUU official who has sat as a full member on the NLC’s Central Working Committee.
11)
Sadly, ASUU’s triumphant days ended rather quickly. They could not have lasted anyway. Inevitably the military had its way in the end, and conquered the universities, effectively deploying the twin weapons of pauperization and humiliation. The vocal intellectuals among us who opposed them and would not be silent, as well as the vulnerable ones, were forced into exile to save their lives; BJ among them.
Away from the homeland, not surprisingly, the contradictions which have dogged our steps all along escalated. My friend, being among the best in his calling, rose to the pinnacle of the profession, and became a professor at the prestigious Harvard university, an appointment that is the envy of scholars all over the world. But what an irony for a self-proclaimed Marxist! Can he be comfortable there, in Cambridge, faced every minute with the danger of being co-opted and compromised? Again, with Harvard famously known as one of the redoubtable bastions of white culture, and of capitalist triumphalism in the age of globalization, how will a stalwart, renowned Africanist fit in with other Faculty, except by sitting on one buttock? BJ conspicuously rejects the customary cultural choices of his peers—that is, the westernized elite—in his manner of dressing, and opts instead, in place of expensive suits and agbadas and galabiyas, for simple shirts and bubas of khaki or adire cloth, often in fact worn and threadbare. But is this just taste, or meekness, or a symbolic preference meant to demonstrate an unwavering identification with the poor and to pledge eternal loyalty to their cause? Or is it a kind of vicarious penance, an outward sign of the guilt BJ seems to carry in his heart for being successful among so many failures, for being fortunate where others have fallen abjectly, in spite of themselves, by the wayside? Sometimes, as I tell him in light rebuke, it is almost as if he is ashamed of his achievements.
12)
Among these achievements are the sterling essays he has written about our African authors, especially Chinua Achebe, J.-P. Clark, and Wole Soyinka. His unique insights, his lucidity and command of language (which we refer to laughingly as “igilango geesi”), and his scintillating powers of exegesis, have established BJ as perhaps the most informed and most distinguished figure now among the giants
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