Biodun Jeyifo: Celebrating a life devoted to incisive and analytical thinking, By Yaro Yusufu Mamman

Among conflict theorists, BJ stood tall. He was an incisive and analytical thinker — deeply profound yet remarkably humble. His humility was forged in the furnace of countless study hours. A dialectician, but never a slave to dogma, he engaged Western narratives and cultural theories on literature, history, and historiography in perpetual intellectual combat. His work often intersected with Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, especially in the context of praxis and class struggle.

Once upon a time, we were witnesses to unending intellectual combats in Nigerian universities — contests between different schools of thought across multiple disciplines, particularly in the Arts and Social Sciences. The Cold War was raging, the Portuguese colonial empire was under siege, and the Apartheid regime faced mounting resistance. Nigerian universities became battlegrounds in the anti-Western, anti-imperialist struggle.

It was in this arena that BJ made an indelible mark as a scholar — reinterpreting, debunking, and reconstructing cultural and post-colonial theories. Across Nigerian universities, he developed a devoted following.

Among conflict theorists, BJ stood tall. He was an incisive and analytical thinker — deeply profound yet remarkably humble. His humility was forged in the furnace of countless study hours. A dialectician, but never a slave to dogma, he engaged Western narratives and cultural theories on literature, history, and historiography in perpetual intellectual combat. His work often intersected with Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, especially in the context of praxis and class struggle.

Another lifetime influence on Professor Biodun Jeyifo was his teacher and mentor, Professor Wole Soyinka — a humanist and towering intellectual. Jeyifo’s work on Soyinka remains among the closest and most insightful interpretations of the iconoclast’s literary, political, and broader intellectual engagements. His book Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism (2004) stands as a testament to this scholarly relationship.

Two eminent scholars — Professor Edward Said and Professor Biodun Jeyifo — became foundational figures in the comparative literary study of counter-narratives in colonial and post-colonial societies, as well as in the deconstruction of Western social theories about the Orient and Africa. This field of study attracted scholars from diverse backgrounds and evolved into a mosaic of knowledge, stretching from psychiatry to development studies.

Frantz Fanon’s work on colonialism and mental disorders provided comprehensive documentation of the psychological dimensions of genocide in French Algeria. André Gunder Frank articulated “Dependency Theory”, while Issa G Shivji emerged as a radical critic of neoliberalism. My own teacher, Ankie Hoogvelt, contributed significantly to globalisation and post-colonial studies, and later became an independent researcher on peace and nuclear disarmament. I premise these references to illustrate the intellectual titan that was Biodun Jeyifo.

The works of Edward Said and Biodun Jeyifo provided a paradigm for studying the Orient and African societies — a refreshing discipline and a new frontier in comparative literature, cultural studies, and criticism.

Globalisation, post-industrialisation, cultural and development theories on Westernisation versus industrialisation, peace and conflict studies, democracy, digitisation, imperialism, and human rights, all converged into a narrow intellectual strait. Jeyifo helped us navigate that maritime space with clarity and purpose, liberating our inquiry and sharpening our interrogation of colonialism and colonisation, as both means and ends.

The violent interventions that characterised colonial manifestations inevitably generated resistance. Race and religion often became secondary factors in responding to injustice and discrimination. In the literary space, writers and their works were celebrated, debated, and appreciated — even when they were anti-establishment.

Pushing the frontiers of knowledge and scholarship, vibrant intellectuals in America and Europe — particularly from the structural-functionalist school building on 20th-century post-industrial societies — engaged in rigorous debates. Seminal works by Talcott Parsons, Samuel Huntington, and others contributed to these discourses. On the other side stood conflict theorists who critically examined the psychology of violence, conquest, avarice, plunder, rapacious exploitation, and environmental devastation of conquered societies.

The narratives of the coloniser and the colonised inevitably differed. It is from this prism that I wish to appreciate Professor BJ’s immense contributions to the world of English literature and critical scholarship.

I was invited to his 80th birthday lecture on the 5th of January in Lagos, but I was unable to attend. I sent a goodwill message instead. We shared the same birth month, and I turned 72 just a few days later. Death is wicked; it leaves in its wake unfulfilled wishes. I wish I had gone to Lagos to honour him with my physical presence, but it was not to be.

Good night, Sir.

Yaro Yusuf Mamman is a former Nigerian ambassador to Spain.