Eminents Nigeriand presenting new Fagunwa book to the public

In his own speech, Professor Adeleke Adeeko narrated the genesis of the day’s programme. According to him, “The journey that culminated in today’s occasion started a while back, specifically six years ago around two simultaneous discussions among scholars who all cut their reading teeth on the novels of Fágúnwà. The first discussion began with me, “Mallam” Femi Taiwo, and Olakunle George proposing—with the concurrence of the two others in the editorial group, Tejumola Olaniyan and Nkiru Nzegwu—to issue a special edition of West Africa Review as a means of reigniting critical interest in Fagunwa’s work. We don’t forget both the music and the readings of our youth. The three of us wrote up a call for papers that stressed the comparative, global, and transcultural elements in Fagunwa. For the three of us, these features are the most enduring and striking in the texts, although, they are the least often engaged by Fagunwa scholars”.

He noted that they also sought contributions that explore the various literary, cultural, and historical currents that Fagunwa navigated and the many literary, cultural and historical streams into which his work has flown in theatre, translations, philosophy, and literature in other languages.

He said, “Very early after the West Africa Review plans took off, Taiwo and Akin Adesokan observed during a phone conversation that the year 2013 would mark the 50th anniversary of Chief Fagunwa’s death and they both concluded that a commemorative event would be in order. Thus, as the West Africa Review CFP worked its way through listservs and professional association bulletins, reflections on the dimension of such an event – whether a conference or a symposium – also continued”

He continued, “A third cluster of activities developed in the spring of 2012 when Tejumola Olaniyan, then director and fellow of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research in the Humanities, hosted a conference titled “Enchantings: Modernity, Culture, and the State in Postcolonial Africa” in Madison. During that conference, Kunle Ajibade, visiting from Nigeria to speak at the “Enchantings” meeting, noted that no signs existed yet of any plan to mark the 50th anniversary of Fagunwa’s passing and suggested that the journal plans be delayed so that it can be expanded to include works at a conference which the editorial team should mobilize to put up in Nigeria. The six individuals at that brief meeting in Madison—Ajibade, Adesokan, Ato Quayson, Adeeko Taiwo and Olaniyan—soon evolved, with the exception of Quayson, into Fagunwa Study Group, whose steering members now include, Gbemisola Adeoti, Diwura Fagunwa, Sola Olorunyomi, Moradewun Adejunmobi, Pamela Olubunmi Smith, Wumi Raji, Dele Layiwola, and Tunde Babawale”.

According to him, as soon as Ajibade returned to Nigeria after the Madison conference, he began to work on creating a local organising committee, along with Olorunyomi, Adeoti, and Diwura Fagunwa, the late author’s daughter. Akin Adesokan, from his base at Indiana University, Bloomington, and Tejumola Olaniyan, who made available facilities of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Louis Mead Endowed Professorship, the professorial chair he was then holding, ran the group’s administrative affairs, coordinating correspondence, funding and planning, mainly through online communication with the rest of the group. Among the first set of people Ajibade convinced in Nigeria was Professor Tunde Babawale, then director of the Centre for Black and African Art and Culture, CBAAC. Babawale was instrumental in securing the interests of two state governors, Drs Mimiko of Ondo State and Fayemi of Ekiti State. Babawale’s staff coordinated fundraising efforts here in Nigeria, helped secure venues, made all travel arrangements within and outside Nigeria, and supervised activities for the commemorative conference that was held in August 2013 in Akure.

Adeeko lauded the contribution of Fagunwa’s widow in the success of the conference, which was intended to deepen the critical understanding of Fagunwa’s own self-apprehension as a man of many parts. He said, “At a point, Chief Elizabeth Fagunwa, the author’s then 83-year old widow, felt compelled to intervene and correct apocryphal details about the life of D. O. Fagunwa, especially his final moments. Up to that point, no exact account existed of how the writer met his untimely death on the banks of River Wuya in Bida, northern Nigeria. Indeed, going by the volume of newspaper references to Chief Elizabeth Fagunwa’s intervention, she was the star speaker of the conference! The Akure conference made Mrs Fagunwa a widely quoted Fagunwa scholar! And we’re very happy that she is with us here today. That, in brief, is the story of the origin of the book we are launching today”.

Before he launched the book, Professor Wole Soyinka insisted that he was and is still fascinated by the earlier mystery surrounding the death of Fagunwa because literature and works of imagination are made of such. According to him, Fagunwa’s death was just like the demise of any of his wonderful characters, adding that if he had simply vanished, no serious reader of his novels would have been surprised.

Soyinka’s words: “Sometimes, you begin to substitute such fantasy for the truth. I subscribe to the fact that he just vanished. It was as if he had written about his own passing in a fictive way; as if one of his own creatures came to lead him away into the water. I still prefer my own version of the story of how he left us, the fantasy.”

In her remarks, Fagunwa’s wife, Chief Elizabeth Fagunwa, made frantic efforts to correct the erroneous stories about Fagunwa, saying, “Fagunwa was a human being, he was not a spirit. I married a man not a spirit. Against the notion that Fagunwa’s body was not found, I want to tell you that his body was found and buried in Oke Igbo. She thanked all who attended the event.

The Ondo State government, Sir Ademola Aladekomo, Dr. Olusegun Mimiko, Hon Idowu Obasa, among others, paid generously to buy copies of the book.