Garlands for Abiola Irele at Eighty
by Olu Obafemi
Posted on June
6, 2016 by Francis
Professor
Francis Abiola Irele
Stepping
into the mid-Winter Season of the octogenarians is certainly a tough hill to
climb in this troublous times in our country, when life expectancy is put,
inaccurately, at between 45 and 50. Professor Francis Abiola Irele, one of the
proponents and patriarchs of critical scholarship in Africa is not one to
‘sneak’, unsung, into such ripe times in our rough climes—not only among the
literati, but in the national, international and global communities. So, when
last Monday, May 30, 2016, Professor AbdulRasheed Na’Allah, the dynamo, with
combustible energy and frightening versatility, at the hems of one of the
emerging most internationalized State Universities of our country, hosted the
Valedictory Lecture by the Valedictorian, Abiola Irele, it was an unwitting
double bill-to also celebrate his entry into the age of the Octogenarians.
It
is apposite to recall that, in a way characteristic of him, Professor Abiola
Irele left the comfort and prestige of Harvard, to take up appointment as
pioneer Provost of the Humanities College in the year 2010, at the new Kwara
State University, foundation was yet to be laid and over which university he
had recorded monumental influence in its building as an emerging centre of
intellectual excellence and scholarly ferment within a
bewilderingly short duration of half a decade. Professor Abiola Irele, has been
like a metaphorical pull of the moth to a lamp, as no intellectual called to
work in that institution since Irele had put his stamp by his assured presence
and participation had had any excuse for not coming—and they came in drones,
literally, to help fulfill Na’Allah’s dream of building ‘a world class university.’
By the time of his leaving (hopefully without really leaving having firmly
establish his memory indelibly, with a School (of Theory and Criticism) named
after him and a huge section of the library devoted to his work and collections
donated, most generously, by him to the young University.
Yet,
It is, to say the least, a matter for great pity, that this
important occasion of Irele’s Eightieth birthday, almost went without a loud
notice in our country, where Professor Abiola has paid more than his dues in
the crafting and nurturing of the essential Nigerian literary tradition—its
canon, philosophy, theory, aesthetics and ideology. He had to, at the beginning
of his Lecture, on “What is Negritude?” quietly announce that he
turned eighty last Saturday, Thursday, May 28, 2016. No audience, and one
representing in a micro fashion some of the most qualitative in the
academia—Humanities and the Natural Sciences—could be more shocked, more
embarrassed, by our collective memory-less-ness (or is it just forgetfulness
that the man aptly described across the world, variously, as ‘the most
authoritative voice in African Literature” (by his first Graduate student, the
renowned dramatist, Femi Osofisan), the “doyen of African literary scholarship
and scholars globally “, a “fundamental figure in Francophone African and
Caribbean Studies” and among his peers and close associates, led by Africa’s
first Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, as Olohuniyo—variously captured as one with
the velvet voce of salt, with regard to his legendary verbal eloquence, the
redolence and fragrance of his speech pitch, what the French would describe as
‘aromatique or/and deodoran’. These translation of Olohuniyo captures more the
depth and quality of his thoughts, in advance of the drinkability of his voice
I delivery; thoughts and articulation of the essential African philosophy,
ideology and theory, with its ramifying impact on the entire African,
Caribbean, Diaspora and world consciousness. The drums still must be rolled out
in celebration of Abiola Irele at Eighty.
A
member of the first generation of African critical tradition, establishing the
evaluative criteria for the evolving African literature and philosophy of both
Anglophone and Francophone expressions from the sixties, Professor Irele’s
bio-data is commonplace on the internet and on the pages of the media the
world over and need not provide obvious boredom here if recounted. Born May 28,
1936, Professor Irele studied French in the University College, Ibadan,
graduating in 1960. He took his PhD in French at the University of Paris,
Sobourne in 1960 writing his dissertation on the work of the Martiniqan coiner
of the concept of Negritude, Aime Cesaire. Negritude is a literary and
ideological phenomenon which Irele has given, unarguably, the most
comprehensive attention in his numerous works. We shall briefly return to the
concept a little later. Professor Irele, a global teacher, scholar and
inimitable intellectual, has taught in the universities of Ife, Ghana, Ohio
State University, and the University of Harvard as Visiting Professor of
African and African American Studies, berthing almost finally on the virgin
land of Malete, Kwara State as Provost and Director of the Press of the Kwara
State University through which he has churned out a number of seminal
publications including the highly rated Savannah. By the way,
besides full length studies, Professor Irele is one the most sought after
scholar as editor of journals, books and reviews and critical anthologies
on African, African-American, Caribbean literature among them are Transition
Magazine, Africa in the World,& and the World in Africa, African
Literature: An Overview and Bibliography, The Cambridge Companion to the
African Novel, Economic History of Africa (with Biodun Jeyifo), Research in
African Literatures, and so on…
In
establishing and affirming the truism of Irele’s stature in African literature
as a critical and distinctive celebrated and cerebral African and Africanist
scholar and as doyen and undisputable authority, it is important to
contextualize his essential contribution to literary theory, literary ideology
and literary philosophy in which Negritude is only a landmark contribution, the
study and dissemination of which he stands out like a colossus. Of his numerous
and diversified publications, the following selected works have become the
signposts of his scholarly gifts to the Humanities: The African
Experience in Literature and Ideology: Studies in African Literature (1981,
1990), The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Diaspora (2001),
Dimensions of African Discourse ( 1992), Order, Pedagogy and the
‘Postcolonial’ (1995), Negritude, Literature and Ideology in the African
Philosophy Reader, The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature?
(With Simon Gikandi, 2004), What is Africa to Me? Africa in the Diaspora
Imagination, Negritude et Condition Africaine (2009), Negritude—Postcolonial
and Post-Imperial Literature, European Language Writing: Sub-Saharan Africa
(1986), The Negritude Moment: Expectations in Francophone and Caribbean
Literature and Thought (2010, and numerous others!
What
is of critical import is not the numerical strength of his publications but the
quality and value of his seminal writings in lending penetrative insight to
essential soul and mind of the Africa (what he has graphically captured and
conceptualized as the African experience and imagination, the humiliation
and subjection of the African personality through centuries of the inhuman
slave traffic, colonialism, imperialism and neo-imperialism and the valiant
struggle of Africans, since as far back as the Haitian revolt of 1918-19, in
which the Africans regained their manhood through physical battle, an
experience which Irele informs us, contrary to our usual claim that Negritude
began with the ‘discovery’ of the concept y Aime Cesaire and popularized by
Leopold Sedar Senghor, as the original beginning of the Negritude movement. On
Negritude itself, the study of its history, ideology and ramifying impact,
there cannot be many citable authorities before and after Abiola Irele.
Critical education and elucidation of the Negritude phenomenon emerging from
his over five decades of encyclopedic discourse and critical narrative flows
thus, perhaps not in that logical sequence; Negritude as a ‘movement of
emotion and ideas (on the level of emotions, that attribution to Senghor
of Negritude as establishing the power of emotion and rhythm with scant
reference to reason and intellection is often erroneously made and which Irele clarifies
for us); Negritude defined further as a ‘psychological response/reaction to the
social and cultural conditions of the colonial situation, and the fervent
and rigorous quest for a new and original orientation and self-reinvention as
established by creative writers, scholars and intellectuals such as Senghor,
Cesaire, the Diops, Oyono, Laye, Beti, and so on– all of whom offered
testimonies to the human and psychological problems and ‘inner conflicts of
colonialism ; Irele further draws an ideological parallel between
Negritude and Pan-Africanism , the latter transcending sheer propaganda and
going beyond the immediate condition of depravity wrought by colonialism toward
a symbolic ‘progression from subordination, centering scholarship beyond dependence
mentalities to independence and identity retrieval through ‘revolt and
affirmation.’
Limited,
as we are in this brief Tribute, it is important to highlight what seems to me
to be the highpoint of Irele’s ideological and philosophical submission on
Negritude, one that began to manifest in his earlier study of Cesaire’s works
on Negritude. We find this, most unmistakably in Irele’s comprehensive study,
The Negritude Moment: Expectations in Francophone and Caribbean Literature and
Thoughts from which matters of historical salience on the subject
emerged, namely a re-visitation of the history and origin of Negritude, a
concept, ideology and movement that has become one of the most influential
cultural and political theory beyond the twentieth century. Irele re-establishes
the crucial need for African movements to reconstruct ideologies for
self-justification and positive re-evaluation through rigorous analysis and
evaluation and historical contextualization of Negritude; re-exploration of
Negritude as a concept, providing succinct account and narrative of its
historical and ideological backgrounds, its epistemology and cognitive
dimension, in terms of the key themes that preoccupied the French-speaking
black creative writers and intellectuals, the difficulties that bedevil and
confront their collective experience, especially the white-supremacist
hegemonic ideological and civilization domination of the mind, psyche and
material being of the black man; the need to develop counter-narratives of
counter-factual dimensions to the imperialist ones. He focuses, summatively, on
the various debates that Negritude has generated over the decades and the
emergence, inexorably, of ‘ postcolonial evolutionary consciousness in the
black world, what the late radical sociologist, Omafume Onoge aptly
defined as ‘positive affirmative consciousness in Negritude..
In
laying emphasis on Negritude in our Tribute, it must never be misconstrued as
the sole engagement and contribution of Irele to African literature, theory and
ideology—indeed African literary cannon and aesthetics. Far from it. He has
engaged all genres of literature and philosophy—from oral literature and
performance to contemporary literary theatre and performance; from poetry and
prose-fiction to anthologies and philosophical polemics on the human condition
in Africa. He has lent pioneering insights into the works of key African
creators—from Achebe and Conton to Soyinka and Laye, Kamau Braithwaite, Amadou
Korouma and Derek Walcott. He has led exploration into the works of pioneer
Yoruba classicist like D.O. Fagunwa and the fictional experiment of Amos
Tutuola, just as much as he has given robust critical attention to the works of
the later generation of Osofisan, Osundare, Omotoso, and so on.
If
Irele has not been adequately rewarded in terms of recognition and endowment
(as he has not been), his many awards and laurels such as the Fellowship of the
Nigerian Academy of Letters and the Nigerian National Order of Merit are
critical palliatives for a man whose works and name occupy a covetable and
enviable place in the un-etched Hall or House of Fame of Nigeria, Africa and
the Globe. Happy Birthday to a worthy, frontline African and Africanist
Humanist, legendary thinker and indomitable world scholar and
intellectual—Francis Abiola Irele at eighty well-lived years on earth.
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