The death of Professor Biodun Jeyifo, Marxist cultural theorist and a leading scholar of global post-coloniality, on Wednesday, 11 February, shocked and disoriented many people across the world, especially his closest friends and associates. Just a month earlier, he had appeared at the celebration of his eightieth birthday in Lagos and, though apparently frail, had participated fully in the day-long series of activities, his usual energy, warmth, humour, and grace on effortless display. Another celebration followed in Ibadan a week later, where he was seen dancing with great exuberance. The reported cause of his death was renal failure.
Popularly known and addressed as BJ, the late Jeyifo was an emeritus professor of African and African American Studies and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, having joined the faculty in 2006. He had moved to Harvard from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, where he taught as a professor of English for 18 years, starting in 1988. He also held teaching or research positions at Indiana University Bloomington, Freie University of Berlin, Peking University in China, and many other places.
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Born in Ibadan on 5 January 1946, Jeyifo had his elementary, secondary, and tertiary education in that city, attending the University of Ibadan, where he graduated with First Class honours in English, the third person to achieve that feat in the history of the department. After a brief stint as a graduate student, he enrolled at New York University for his doctoral degree, studying with Richard Schechner, the pre-eminent theatre scholar, and completing the programme in a record three years. Returning to Nigeria, he taught for two years at his alma mater before moving to the then-University of Ifẹ (now Ọbafẹmi Awolọwọ University).
In the company of luminaries such as the playwright Wọle Ṣoyinka, the 1986 Nobel laureate in Literature (who was his undergraduate teacher), the novelist Kọle Ọmọtọṣọ, and playwright Akinwumi Iṣọla, Jeyifo worked tirelessly, mentoring two generations of students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. During his ten-year stay at the university, he also published two pathbreaking monographs on drama: By Popular Demand: The Yoruba Traveling Theatre of Nigeria (1984) and The Truthful Lie: Essays in the Sociology of African Drama (1985) and numerous academic and journalistic essays. His other books include Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity (2001), Conversations with Wole Soyinka (2001), Modern African Drama: A Norton Critical Edition (2002), Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism (2004), Africa in the World, The World in Africa (2011) – an edited collection dedicated to the late Abiọla Irele, and Against the Predators’ Republic: Political and Cultural Journalism 2007-2013 (2016).
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In addition to his research and teaching, Jeyifo was highly involved in academic unionism and diverse publishing activities. In 1980, he became the first president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Nigeria’s main association of university professors, travelling across the country for meetings and consultations. A notable figure in the university’s progressive circles, he was also a founding member of the editorial collective that published the radical journal, Positive Review. He wrote and directed plays and put together scores of performance reviews. He participated in underground revolutionary events. When the university administration denied his application for a leave without pay to write a book in 1987, he resigned and moved to the United States, teaching for a year at Oberlin College, before joining the faculty at Cornell.
A scholar, theorist, activist, playwright, and cultural journalist, Jeyifo was a man of boundless energy. He was the world’s leading authority on Wole Ṣoyinka, and he was finalising another summative monograph on the playwright’s career when he passed away. Writing about Jeyifo in 2018, the literary scholar, Tẹjumọla Ọlaniyan, wrote: “Apart from Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, there is arguably no other scholar more attentive to the radically dispersed accents or strands of thinking the postcolonial than Jeyifo…”
ALSO READ: Biodun Jeyifo (BJ): Fond memories of a committed intellectual, By Jibrin Ibrahim
Ọlaniyan, himself a former student of Jeyifo, wrote further that “[i]t is in the work of Jeyifo that you will find the most consistently balanced sense of the field of postcolonial discourse, the most insistent reminder and relativization that the poststructuralist version is just one in a long line and large pool of many articulations of the global problematic of modernity from the point of view of the formerly colonized, which is really what postcolonialism…is all about in its conceptually richer and non-chronological understanding.”
Tributes are already being written in remembrance of this gifted and universally respected scholar, and many more will surely be written in weeks, perhaps months, to come.
What made him such an outstanding figure, in a world never in want of people of distinction? Apart from his tireless and genuine support of his students — across four generations at his formal retirement in 2019 — Jeyifo also distinguished himself with the ease with which he embraced any situation requiring a thinking disposition. He never shied away from complexity; it is safe to say that complexity courted him. A nimbly dialectical mind, he possessed an unusual gift for making a given multifaceted notion feel like the lived reality of an individual and for making an ordinary detail in an individual’s experience rise to the level of high theoretical significance.
Jeyifo’s death cannot be said to mark the end of an era, since several of his colleagues, friends, and comrades are still with us, and he consciously sought and established connections with a new generation in several areas. It is, however, the exit, on this side of the known world, of a unique intelligence, a man of great compassion, an outstanding teacher and mentor of many. He will be greatly missed.
