Distinguished scholar / AI test
Today: Jídé Salawu, writer and editor at Olongo Africa.
Issue No. 539
Jeyifo’s Apprentices
Jídé Salawu
Jeyifo’s Apprentices
by Jídé Salawu
In 2012 I asked my advisor, Professor Gbemisola Adeoti, how I could secure a teaching appointment at the University, and he told me I needed to enroll in graduate school. Three years later I started my graduate studies in Ile-Ife at Obafemi Awolowo University. I returned to the Department of English’s literature program: this was my old department, where I had completed my B.A. Most of my professors were familiar. My interest in the African literary curriculum—especially in its conservative nature and rigidity, in its refusal to allow the consideration of fresh voices—had always elicited strong dissenting feelings in me. To be a great teacher, you also have to see scholarship and teaching as a form of apprenticeship. Ife became my apprenticeship ground.
When the African Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka left the University of Ibadan, where he taught drama, he came to Ife and became a professor in the Department of Dramatic Arts. His aura filled the air. It was no whisper that the Nigerian dramatist, Ahmed Yerima, was a disciple of Soyinka, with many other scholars tailing him as he walked across the campus. Many of the professors there are Soyinka’s apprentices. As Nigeria was going through a period of leadership turmoil, from the 1970s through the 1990s, Ife was the radical base for many left-wing intellectuals in Nigeria. Among them was Professor Biodun Jeyifo, who died a few weeks ago in Ibadan at the age of 80.
Jeyifo’s writing and teaching life at home and in the diaspora are inspirational for what literary apprenticeship should look like. What made Ife great as a first-generation university in Nigeria was the result of the radical orientation among writers cultivated by the school during a period of political instability. Yet it was also fertile ground for the apprenticeships of a whole cohort of African literary greats.
Keep us breathing fire!
For $3/month you can read this whole post and get our weekdaily newsletter too!