Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Digest for usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com - 25 updates in 13 topics

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Osakue Omoera

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Sep 11, 2016, 5:49:14 AM9/11/16
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Hearty congratulations to Prof of Profs - Prof Dasylva. May God grant you more strength like the eagle IJMNA.
Osakue S. Omoera

On Sat, Sep 10, 2016 at 8:45 PM, <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>: Sep 10 08:38PM +0100

* ​*
*The Guardian Literary Series
<https://www.facebook.com/joseph.oreh/posts/1742676752649144>*
 
 
 
 
​ ​
* As it Was in the Beginning*
 
 
 
by
 
 
 
Sunny
Awhefeada
 
 
Much of what constitutes Nigerian literature derives its origin from the
pages of newspapers. Scholars have pointed to the 19th century as the
tentative moment for the evolution of what metamorphosed into written
Nigerian literature. Lagos which now means so many things to Nigeria came
into prominence in the 19th century. The return of freed slaves to Lagos,
its annexation by the British in 1860, the coastal presence of the Atlantic
Ocean and its proximity to large settlements easily made it a place for
different cultures to meet. Described as “the Liverpool of West Africa”,
the evolving city easily caught the bug of Victorianism which the fading
British Empire let loose on the world. Hence the notion of Victorian Lagos
became a significant reference point in socio-cultural and intellectual
discourses.
 
One of the indices of the Lagos of the 19th century was the presence of
newspapers which primarily kept the emergent elite informed, edified and
entertained. Beyond this, the newspapers charted a new consciousness of
self-expression and assertion of the African personality struggling to be
free from the encumbrances of Slave Trade and European imposed inferiority
status. Some of the leading newspapers which defined Victorian Lagos were
The Anglo-African, Lagos Observer, Lagos Standard and Lagos Weekly. Apart
from carrying news from Britain, other West African enclaves, Lagos and
environs, the newspapers also published short stories and poems. The
involvement of the newspapers in promoting literary engagement was aimed at
depicting the vitality of the indigenous culture. This turned out to be in
sync with the growing anti-European consciousness of the period. Since
newspapers could easily reach a large audience the emergent literati used
them to portray their literary prowess and taste in an early attempt at
cultural nationalism.
 
The consolidation of newspapers as veritable platforms for the propagation
of what appears as the earliest intimations of Nigeria’s literary
production continued into the 20th century. In the first four decades of
that century, budding Nigerian poets tried their hands at poetry which
first appeared in newspapers such as The Sierra Leone Weekly News based in
Freetown and The West African Pilot owned by Nigeria’s Nnamdi Azikiwe, but
based in Accra in the then Gold Coast now Ghana. The poetry appearing in
these newspapers complemented the strides of Nigerian nationalists during
the struggle for independence. Some of the poets whose poems appeared in
the newspapers were nationalists in the vanguard of the anti-colonial
struggle. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Dennis Osadebay were prominent in the fold
​.​
Nigeria’s independence came in 1960 and the nation basked in the usual
euphoria of freedom, but not many people paused to consider the role
newspapers played in the realization of the hard won independence. None
probably gave a thought to the role played by newspaper poetry. However, as
the nation evolved through many twists and turns more newspapers were
established to serve different motives. It was part of this national
evolution that saw to the birth of The Guardian newspaper in 1983.
 
The Guardian set out as a liberal newspaper with a high destiny which it
expressed in its motto “conscience nurtured by truth”. The publisher, Mr.
Alex Ibru looked in the direction of the ivory tower in his bid to ensure
that the newspaper he was setting up would turn out like no other not just
in Nigeria, but in Africa. Before then, however, there was a salutary
development in Nigerian journalism in the late 1970s which fostered Mr.
Ibru’s intention. That phenomenon was the marriage between the ivory tower
and the fourth estate of the realm which Dr. Stanley Macebuh represented at
The Daily Times. When Ibru founded The Guardian, he did so with Macebuh a
literary scholar with a doctorate as his man Friday. In assembling what has
become known as the “sunshine commune” Macebuh beckoned to cerebral
elements in the universities. Soon The Guardian was invaded by university
dons of radical persuasion and the newsroom almost got transformed into a
classroom. Among those who bestrode Rutam House as the building housing The
Guardian is known, were Femi Osofisan distinguished playwright, Yemi
Ogunbiyi drama teacher at the then University of Ife, Onwuchekwa Jemie of
Towards the Decolonization of African Literature fame, Odia Ofeimun notable
poet and first rate public intellectual, Edwin Madunagu leftist university
don, among others. In no time The Guardian established itself as Africa’s
leading newspaper as its editorial and opinion essays were nonpareil. The
newspaper became the toast in town and its popularity among all classes of
Nigerians was high.
The literary scholars at The Guardian particularly Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi
extended Ibru’s dream beyond a scope unimagined in Nigerian journalism.
Ogunbiyi thought of devoting some pages to literature. The idea sounded out
of place in a context where hot news items and advertisement competed for
space with profit margins in mind. The question of how literary engagement
will bring in profit for The Guardian which is essentially a business
outfit cropped up. However, Ogunbiyi was fortunate to have a literary
virtuoso of the stature of Macebuh as the man in charge of things at The
Guardian. The presence of other literary maestros also softened things for
Ogunbiyi who then naturally emerged as the general editor of what became
“The Guardian Literary Series”. Ogunbiyi was to write years later,“It was
quite clear from the inception of The Guardian as a serious daily newspaper
in July 1983 that sooner or later, the newspaper would have to participate
in the effort to help ‘popularise’ our vibrant literature. It was clear to
the founding fathers that the literary pages of a serious national
newspaper had an abiding duty to participate, initiate and even stir up
debate in the all-important area of literature and culture. In a broad
sense, that was a prime objective for starting The Guardian Literary Series
(GLS).”
 
Ennobling as Ogunbiyi’s vision appeared, it was not easy getting the series
started. In his own recollections, the plans for the series began early in
1984 during which he had a brainstorming session with G. G. Darah, then his
colleague at Ife. Yet it did not kick off until Saturday, February 2, 1985
one full year later! However, once it began the series did overwhelm its
proponent Ogunbiyi and the literary musketeers who shared his vision. Every
Saturday, the series published critical essays on aspects of Nigerian
literature. From the first publication to the last when the series was
rested, it contributed immensely to the critical evaluation of Nigerian
literature. Of particular interest is the range of the essays which covered
the origins and development of written Nigerian literature as well as
literatures in indigenous languages such as Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. These
essays have gone a long way in establishing an authentic literary pedigree
not only for the ethnic nationalities represented, but also as a template
for groups not represented. Many of the contributors drew attention to
different trends and tendencies in Nigerian literature. The discursive
interventions cover women, language and the Nigerian civil war. There were
also debates, especially the one on “literary criticism in the Nigerian
Context” an illuminating tiff between Abiola Irele and Dan Izevbaye, two of
Nigeria’s leading literary critics.
 
The series also provided a platform for the celebration and affirmation of
literary scholars and their achievements through their contributions to the
development of Nigerian literature. In addition to this is the exposure of
Nigerian literary critics to the reading public. It is instructive to note
that academics of the period in question were largely isolated and cocooned
in the ivory tower with the exception of a few who joined the tradition of
column writing in newspapers. “The Guardian Literary Series” bridged the
gap between the populace and the literary critics through the regular
Saturday encounters. The significance of these Saturday encounters was
situated in the enunciation of a critical dialogue between the reading
public and the literati. Many readers of The Guardian got addicted to it
because of the literary menu it offered.
 
The monumental contributions of “The Guardian Literary Series” to the
consolidation of Nigerian literature will remain undiminished. A look at
the writers that came under the critical attention of contributors will
show that there was hardly any Nigerian writer from inception to the 1980s
that was left out in the critical engagement. From Olaudah Equiano to Ben
Okri, almost every Nigerian writer that ever published was made a subject
of critical inquisition. The creative endeavours of some writers such as
Pita Nwana, Obi Egbuna, John Muonye, Pol Ndu, Adegoke Durojaiye, Oladeji
Okediji, INC Aniebo, etc, that would have been lost in the critical
reckoning of Nigerian literature were exhumed and subjected to critical
appraisal. Hence Timothy Aluko, Aminu Kano, Mamman Vatsa, etc, found a
space as much as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Niyi Osundare. The series
also brought many new writers as well as critics to limelight.
 
In retrospect, it could be said that the birthing of “The Guardian Literary
Series” at the time was by no means fortuitous. This is so because the
1980s can be regarded as the high watermark of Nigerian literature and the
series was just on hand to help give the literature the critical validation
it needed. Truth, the first half of the 1960s was promising for Nigerian
literature, however the Nigerian crises and the attendant civil war numbed
the writers into creative hiccups. The 1970s was a decade of rumination and
recovery from the physical and psychological devastation caused by the war.
Truth was that some works were written against the background of the civil
war in the 1970s, nevertheless the literary enterprise of that decade did
not approximate the promise of the 1960s.
 
Yet it must be said that the 1970s was the period of ideological gestation
that came to maturity in the 1980s. The 1980s was not only remarkable as
the decade of Wole Soyinka’s winning of the Nobel Prize, it also witnessed
a creative windfall that brought Femi Osofisan, Odia Ofeimun, Niyi
Osundare, Tanure Ojaide, Festus Iyayi, Zaynab Alkali, Olu Obafemi, Bode
Osanyin, Obiora Udechukwu, Ossie Enekwe, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Livinus
Odozor, Femi Fatoba, Funso Aiyejina, Ada Ugah, Ezenwa Ohaeto, Harry Garuba,
Tess Onwueme, Sam Ukala, Ben Okri, Eno Obong, Ifeoma Okoye, Wale Okediran,
Ken Saro Wiwa and others to the attention of the world.
Protean and wide ranging as the creative output was, the critics of that
era rose to the occasion and did a yeoman job in their analysis and
evaluation of the literary works. The robust critical interventions which
the critics wrote for “The Guardian Literary Series” are about the most
significant engagements ever with Nigerian literature. The critics not only
evaluated the works, they also gave them critical authority which ushered
them into canonicity and it can be said that the influence of “The Guardian
Literary Series” facilitated the confidence which engendered the
codification of Nigerian literature as a national literature. A roll call
of the authoritative critics who wrote for “The Guardian Literary Series”
is interminable. Such was the verve and single mindedness of purpose with
which the scholars pursued the agenda to evolve a critical canon for
Nigerian literature in the series. It is however, sad to note that many of
the critics who contributed to the series as well as the writers whose
works they provided critical anchor for now live and work outside Nigeria.
The brain drain of the late 1980s and 1990s ensured that they migrated to
Europe and America.
 
Like everything good in Nigeria it was not long before it became sunset for
“The Guardian Literary Series”. The economic and political crises of the
later part of the 1980s and all of the 1990s took its toll on everything in
Nigeria. The university system which was the constituency of the critics
and many of the writers was severely assailed and they suffered some level
of destabilisation. The economy was in troubled waters and literary
productions suffered a great deal. In fact, many critics proclaimed a dead
end for Nigerian literature as the struggle for food and survival
supplanted the desire for book and reading.
 
An ill wind that blew nobody any good, as the crises buffeted the nation
and everything defining it including literary representations, the
initiator of “The Guardian Literary Series”, Yemi Ogunbiyi put together the
essays in book form for posterity. The essays now make up two seminal
volumes aptly titled Perspectives on Nigerian Literature: 1700 to the
Present subtitled A Critical Selection from The Guardian Literature vols. 1
& 2 edited by Ogunbiyi and published by Guardian Books Nigeria Limited in
1988. The two volumes not only turned out to be best sellers, but they have
become the most authoritative reference points in the critical expose on
Nigerian literature.
The return of “The Guardian Literary Series” is the brainchild of Abraham
Obomeyoma Ogbodo the present editor of the newspaper. Ogbodo read Theatre
Arts at the University of Calabar in the 1980s and still carries nostalgic
memories of what “The Guardian Literary Series” was and did in those days
when it provided a mentally nourishing a la carte on Nigerian literature
for students, teachers and the general reading public. Many people who read
the series during its first coming carry the same nostalgic thoughts
bordering on wistfulness. Since the information went out about the return
of the series I have been inundated with calls and messages expressing
support for the project. I have had cause to interact with some of the
doyens who made the series the tour de force that it was. I had instructive
interactions with Odia Ofeimun, G. G. Darah and Yemi Ogunbiyi.
 
Since the 1990s to date Nigerian literature has demonstrated an uncommon
resilience. Time there was when many feared that it was going to be
asphyxiated, but the literature rebounded with promise throwing up a new
crop of writers who can hold their own anywhere in the world. So far, so
much has happened since the 1990s or better put since the turn of the
millennium in 2000. In prose, drama and poetry new writers have emerged to
inscribe the Nigerian experience in narratives, dialogues and verses. The
older writers, many of whom were emergent in the 1980s when “The Guardian
Literary Series” ran, are still active on the literary scene as they encode
the Nigerian experience alongside with the new writers many of whom they
mentored and inspired.
 
In line with the remarkable growth of Nigerian literature new tendencies
and trends have also been thrown up. Some of these include rethinking the
Nigerian civil war, globalization, migration, exile, dislocation, eco-lit,
trans-nationalism, etc. The current state of Nigerian literature reflects
bountiful creative harvest, but with scant critical attention. The present
generation of critics has not demonstrated enough vigour to match the
productive energy of the not so new and emergent writers which has resulted
in a gust of
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>: Sep 10 08:27PM +0100

Professor Isidore Okpewho
<https://www.facebook.com/joseph.oreh/posts/1741812366068916>
 
 
How Difficult It Is to Say Farewell?
 
 
by
 
 
Ajirioghene J. Oreh
 
I woke up on Monday 5th September, 2016 with an audacity of hope. Looking
forward to a new day, a new week, and expecting everything good will come.
The day had not gone far when the news came that the doyen of African oral
literature and the most eminent scholar of oral literature in the world
just passed away. Ah! Hopes were dashed. I was looking forward to the day I
will encounter him physically. Looking forward to that great day I will pay
my obeisance to him, and take a photograph with him I will forever
cherished. In fact, I was planning how to do a birthday tribute for him
when he would have clocked seventy-five on November this year. All plans
are ruined. No thanks to death!
 
It was on the genial Dr. Senayon Olaoluwa’s Facebook wall that I saw the
shocking news that Professor Isidore Okpewho has passed on into the
wonderful Elysium of haloed literary ancestors. The shock was too great. My
hands were shaking. I shuddered with cold. My heart fluttered. I had ``to
drop my phone on my reading table, put away my eyeglass, and wiped the
tears already flowing freely from my eyes. Professor Isidore Okpewho passed
away? When? Where? How? These were the questions on my lip, and those who
had been privileged to have read him, and encountered him physically. It
was unbelievable! Amidst the excruciating pain and grief, I took up my
phone and, I went online to confirm if the news making round was without a
doubt true. There it was bold headlines of his passing away at the age of
seventy-four! I shouted in my room ‘Death where is thy sting?!’ Death
denied me the great opportunity to encounter the monumental oral literature
scholar of all times and seasons. Overwhelmed with shock, I let out another
cry, a piercing one that attracted my mother to my room, not again! Yes,
not again. We are yet to come to terms with the joining of the literary
ancestors of the captain of creative writing in Africa, Captain (Dr.)
Elechi Amadi, (MFR), the iconic author of the Concubine (1966), here is
another death, another blow, a devastating blow. Indeed, this is too much,
too much to handle. Professor Isidore Okpewho passed away at a time the
emerging creative writers and literary critics need the guidance of the
elder statesmen and veterans in Nigerian literary firmament.
 
Professor Isidore Okpewho was a world intellectual heavyweight. Professor
Okpewho belong to the class of highly respected Urhobo scholars that has
Professors Onigu Otite, Omafume Friday Onoge (blessed memory), Peter Palmer
Ekeh, Bruce Onobrakpeya, David T. Okpako, Andrew Onokerhoraye, Simon
Umukoro, G.G. Darah, Tanure Ojaide, Samuel Erivwo, Michael Nabofa, Samuel
Iboje, Albert Aweto, Amos Utuama, and of course the academic matriarch,
Professor (Mrs.) Rose Aziza. In Professor Isidore Okpewho, hyperbole,
extravagant exaggeration of facts becomes an understatement. He was a
literary man well-known in the two literary traditions, oral and written.
Professor Okpewho was a literary conglomerate. A critical survey of the
development in the teaching of African oral literature and folklore will
show that his research works and publications shaped the curriculum and the
pedagogy of the course, African oral literature. Some of his canonical
critical texts are African Oral Literature (1992), The Epic in Africa:
Towards a poetics of Oral Performance (1979), Myth in Africa: A Study of
its aesthetic and cultural relevance (1983), The Oral Performance in Africa
(1990, edited), African oral literature: Background, Character and
Continuity (1992), and Once Upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony and Identity
(1998). These critical texts and other scholarly publications established
him the leading scholar of oral literature in the world.
 
Thus, by virtue of his pioneering and influential contribution to oral
literature, Professor Okpewho can be compared to Professor Adeboye
Babalola, the author of the Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala (1966),
Professor Oyineda Ogunba whose PhD dissertation completed in 1968 is titled
“Ritual Drama of the Ijebu People: A Study in indigenous Festivals, Donatus
Nwoga and Romanus Egudu for their peerless Poetic Heritage: Igbo
Traditional Verse (1971), Dandatti Abdulkadir whose very insightful study
“The Poetry, Life and Opinions of Sa’adu Zungur” according to Africa’s
revolutionary Folklorist, Professor G.G. Darah of the Delta State
University, Abraka is among studies that “redefined the scope and
theoretical quality of oral literature research in the Hausa-Fulani
cultural areas of Northern Nigeria”. This writing is printed as chapter
seventeen of G.G. Darah’s edited Radical essays on Nigerian literature
published by Malthouse Press Limited in 2008, Wole Soyinka for his Myth,
Literature and the African World (1976), ‘Professor’ Wande Abimbola, the
celebrated author of Ifa: An Exposition` of Ifa literary Corpus and Ifa
Divination Poetry published in 1970 and 1977 respectively. Professor Ropo
Sekoni, who has to his credit Folk Poetics: A Sociosemiotic Study of Yoruba
Trickster and Professor G.G. Darah, author of Battles of Songs: Udje
Tradition of the Urhobo (2005) and Udje Song-Poetry Tradition of the Urhobo
people and Oral Literature in Africa (2010).
 
In looking at the international scholar, Professor Isidore Okpewho and
Nigerian oral literature, one has reasons to beat chest that all is well,
that studies is blossoming. Professor Godini G. Darah in his enlightening
essay “Teaching African Oral literature: A Nigerian perspective” published
in African Literature Today, number 29, 2011, focuses on the “trends and
phases of teaching and research, the scholars who influenced them and some
the books and publications that resulted from their efforts”. Darah says
the late Professor Okpewho was the major influence in the teaching,
research and fieldworks by scholars, teachers and students of oral
literature and folklore from the mid-1970s, especially in the English
Department of the University of Ibadan (UI), Ibadan. UI is the homestead of
the discourse of oral literature. According to the renowned folklorist,
Professor Okpewho “made it mandatory for the students in the oral
literature course to undertake fieldwork to obtain material for their final
year honours essays”. The late eminent scholar did not just halt there;
remarkable was “Okpewho’s practice of citing the works of his students in
this teaching and publications”. Yes, it is true; in some of his writings I
read while working on this short tribute, I encountered citations of his
students’ fieldworks.
 
With the turn of the millennium, the prospects of oral literature and
folklore have improved enormously. Students are now eager and enthusiastic
about the course. At Abraka, Professor G.G. Darah is the academic Uloho
(Iroko) tree under whose radical plumage scholars, teachers and students of
the course gathers for edification. Some of Darah’s oral literary
offsprings at Abraka are Alex Roy-Omoni (who taught me ELS 116,
Introduction to Oral literature), Moses Darah, Peter E. Omoko, Josephine
Ngini, Henry Unuajowhofia, Sheikha Ovie-Jack Tuoyo, and others. Like
Professor Okpewho, G.G. Darah is fond of citing his students’ works.
Professors Ademola Dasylva and Olutoyin Jegede are the commanders in chief
of the course at UI. Professor Segun Adekoya is the expert at the renowned
Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. Dr. Felicia Ohwovoriole is the most
prolific at the famous University of Lagos. At RCCG’s Redeemers University,
Mowe near Lagos, erudite Dr. Mark Osama Ighile is the leading scholar. At
other tertiary institutions, there are specialists of the course.
 
With the founding of the Nigerian Oral Literature Association (NOLA) on 6
December, 2010 in Effurun, Delta State, the teaching of oral literature and
studies on Nigerian folklore were boosted. The body which is an active
member of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa
(ISOLA) established in 1995, has a journal called Nigerian Journal of Oral
Literatures. According to Professor Segun Adekoya, the editor in the
opening paragraph of his “Prefactory Note” to the first number, published
August 2013 by Bookraft Limited, Ibadan, says “its objectives are the
appraisal, collection, criticism, development, dissemination,
documentation, preservation, promotion and creative deployment of oral
literatures of all ethnic nationalities in Nigeria”. NOLA still under the
founding presidency of Professor G.G. Darah holds annual conferences.
 
Professor Isidore Okpewho was a foremost poet and a prominent novelist. He
was an extraordinary translator, an excellent editor, a famed critic, and
an adroit recorder of oral materials and data. He had to his credit
anthologies of poems, and essays. Some of his prized and unforgettable
novels are The Last Duty which won the highly coveted African Arts prize
for literature in 1972, The Victims (1970), The Tides (1993) which got him
the reputed Commonwealth Writers prize for Africa, and the radical Call Me
By My Rightful Name published in 1993 by the American African World Press.
Still on the matter of his creative excellence, Dr. (Mrs.) Enajite E.
Ojaruega, a specialist of Modern African Fictions in her very useful essay
“Urhobo Literature in English: A Survey” printed in Aridon: The
International Journal of Urhobo Studies, number 1, 2014 as chapter five,
classified Isidore Okpewho into the “older generation” of Urhobo creative
writers who write English. Other “older generation” of Urhobo writers are
J.P. Clark, whose mother is Urhobo, Tanure Ojaide, Anthony Biakolo, Ben
Okri (the author of the Famished Road (1991), and Neville Ukoli whose The
Twins of the Rain Forest (1968) and Softly, Softly and two folk tales
(1981) are not just a palm library for younger readers alone. Inheres inn
their works are abundant of folklore for intellectual inquiry. He was the
author of Heritage of African Poetry: An anthology of Oral and written
poetry (1985), and Casebook on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (2003).
For his peerless and without equal academic contribution and creativity,
the Nigerian government bestowed on him the highly regarded Nigerian
National Order of Merit Award (NNOMA). Professor Isidore Okpewho who hailed
from Abraka in Delta State left things for us to be proud about. By virtue
of his seminal works on the oral literary tradition, Professor Okpewho put
Nigeria, nay Africa on the global intellectual map.
 
The late respected scholar mentored generation of scholars, some of the
distinguished writers and critics that emerged in the mid-1970s are his
students. Professor Isidore Okpewho served a two-term presidency of ISOLA
(2002-2006), was a professor, and Head of English at the University of
Ibadan, and was a member of numerous editorial advisory boards of journals.
Before his death, he was professor of Africana studies, English, and
Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
That his passing away is attracting magnitude of lamentation and mourning
worldwide is that Professor Isidore Okpewho’s books are of great assistance
to scholars, teachers and students of literature, folklore, anthropology,
sociology, theatre, ethnomusicology, etc. I am looking forward to Delta
State government under His Excellency, Senator (Dr.) Ifeanyi Arthur Okowa
to do the needful by establishing a centre in honour of Professor Isidore
Okpewho in Abraka for appraisal, collection, criticism, development,
dissemination, documentation, preservation, promotion and creative
deployment of oral literatures of all ethnic nationalities in Delta State.
This is the only way for the state to memorialised this illustrious and
distinguished Deltan. I am still caught in cold here. Professor Isidore
Okpewho, the celebrated epic scholar who established the fact that both
epic and myth exist in Africa to the chagrin of Professor Ruth Fennigan and
others, how difficult it is to say my farewell?
 
Adieu, the Grand Commander of Oral Literature in the World.
 
Comrade Oreh is studying English and Literary Studies at the Delta State
University, Abraka
ademola araoye <ara...@gmail.com>: Sep 10 12:33PM -0700

*The Threat on Gabon *
 
*Ademola Araoye*
 
It was predictable that the August 27, 2016 presidential elections in Gabon
was going to be controversial with very high prospects of violence. In the
latest count, with three dead, around 1,000 people have been arrested in
Libreville and other parts of the country. This followed violence that
followed the announcement of the re-election of President Ali Bongo. The
unfortunate reality is that the Gabonese have no meaningful stakes in the
elections. The elections did not offer a real prospect of change as the two
protagonists are both from the family of late Albert Omar Odimba Bongo;
both of them adopted, one literally and the other metaphorically. A win by
any of the two, either the adopted Nigerian child asylum seeker incumbent
Ali Bongo or half Chinese Jean Ping also adopted and married into the Bongo
family, would be a mere continuation of the forty -five year dynastic rule
of Albert Bongo, the former agent of the French intelligence service. The
"anyone but Bongo" mantra of the opposition is empty. As Ali Bongo
ruminates it should strike him that in the weird politics of francophone
Africa indeed "no good deed shall go unpunished".
 
The real contention in the Gabonese presidential elections remains who
between the two in the Bongo political family would better protect and
sustain French historic economic control and a pillage system that had been
the hallmark of the long 42 year rule of Albert Omar Bongo. Ali Bongo's
repudiation of this decadent operative system is at the heart of the
current imbroglio. It has become an issue because Ali Bongo's profound
policy deviation from the path of his father had elicited a serious crisis
in relations between his presidency and the French establishment. The
elections is thus more about the continued control of Gabon by France than
the well being of the Gabonese. The French Foreign Ministry has thus waded
early into the emerged controversy on the side of Jean Ping, demanding the
breakdown of results polling station by polling station. It is paradoxical
that in the Ivorian crisis, Jean Ping and his French controllers had denied
Laurent Gbagbo the same facility. Interestingly, the French Foreign
Ministry, representing the state establishment that most benefitted from
Omar Bongo's almost half a century rule of Gabon that was also propped by
France, also condemned the half century rule of the country by the Bongo
family and expressed the convenient hope that someone outside the family
would be allowed to take charge of the country. The head of the 70-strong
European Union election monitoring team in the country has said the polls
lacked transparency. Meanwhile, congratulating the people and Government of
Gabon for the holding of a peaceful and orderly presidential election on
Saturday, United Nations Secretary-General <http://www.un.org/sg/> Ban
Ki-moon urged all Gabonese to accept the poll results.
 
Under normal circumstances, the sentiments exuded by the French would be
most welcome. But the times and circumstances in Gabon are far from normal.
A win by Ali Bongo would represent a defining defiance against France
unseen since the time of Laurent Gbagbo in Cote d'Ivoire. The French media,
as not unexpected, led by Le Monde, has therefore begun the demonization of
Ali Bongo. Also, French African proxy regime, such as Alhassane Dramane
Ouattara, have been accused of joining the fray in support of France and
Jean Ping. Alhassane Ouattara it may be recalled was a special Counselor of
the late Albert Omar Odimba Bongo. The latter is suspected of bankrolling
the rebellion in Cote d'Ivoire and along with Nigeria provided invaluable
diplomatic support to Ouattara in the Ivorian crisis. As in Cote d'Ivoire,
the emerging crisis in Gabon is about the progressive resistance to the
consolidation of French control over its old pre carre..
 
The late Albert Omar Bongo, an informant to the French Air Force, was
singularly hand-picked and brought to power in 1967 by the legendary
Jacques Foccart, better known as Monsieur Afrique. Gabon, with a small
population of less than a million in the 1960s and swimming in oil, a
strategic asset responsible for a national but privatized money glut, had a
special place in the African policy of French President and national hero
Charles de Gaulle. Mr. De Gaulle created a quasi-ministry for African
affairs, later dubbed the "African Cell," with a strong presidential
mandate , to keep Gabon, Ivory Coast and other Sub-Saharan colonies on
track of French domination. In pursuit of this mandate, Mr Foccart, as the
founding head of the African cell in the French presidency, was the
manipulator who kept Francophone Africa in line.
 
At a time when Africa bristled with by anti-colonialist passions, Foccart
successfully created the formal structures that have since sustained
France's insufferable back breaking bear hug not only in Francophone
Africa, but again in controlling developments in the Organization of the
African Unity and its metamorphosed African Union, at least until its proxy
Jean Ping was relieved of the Presidency of the Commission of the African
Union. Jacques Foccart is credited as the mastermind of the
behind-the-scenes daring adventures that led Francafrique networks (of
officers, administrators, ambassadors and other agents) to perpetuate
French influence in Tropical Africa and Morocco. Algeria being a notable
exception having defeated French forces in its revolutionary uprising to
reject in 1963 France's attempts to integrate the Arab country as *France
Outremeer*, (France Overseas).
 
The man Monsieur Foccart depended largely on the deployment of the French
military to install African leaders friendly to France and to remove or
eliminate, often through coup d'etat and or assassinations of leaders that
strayed too far from French control. Mr. Foccart coordinated with French
state-run companies to secure special privileges, sometimes exclusive
access to oil and other natural resources. This created the beginnings of
FrancAfrique. Against this background, the need to pry open the space for
autonomy of action for the African Union and the integrity of its internal
processes was an important undercurrent of the vigorous challenge of
Africanist states against the Nigeria, ostensibly protecting informal
conventions of the African Union, led support of conservative actors for
Jean Ping in the July 2012 elections for the Presidency of the African
Union Commission. Nigeria's allies in that elections were the conservative
circle of states comprised of the consolidated proxies of France in Africa
 
Francafrique, even in its residual state in 2016, involves deep penetration
of target states through a complex web of institutional and informal
relations that ensure that France is a major player, read controlling
counterpart, in the affairs of many African countries and even of the
African Union. The emphasis on the African Union is important. Professor
Lamine Kabba observes that through the networks of this largely opaque
conglomerate in Africa, France, a concessionary founding member of the UN
Security Council and the World Bank, can boast a significant global
influence that extends far beyond the French-speaking states. He adds that
it involves an effective style of diplomacy that is not necessarily staffed
with well-seasoned accredited diplomats, but energetic and daring doers.
Francafrique builds relations that rely on close personal connections woven
between the French leadership (the president and his close aides) and
individual African leaders who depended on French assistance and security
forces. Kabba notes that Francafrique excelled in channeling funds to
electoral campaigns of some prominent French politicians too. Despite long
term rhetoric about the scaling down of French influence in the internal
affairs of its proxy states in Africa, the strategic interests of France
has turned support for Africa democracy into a strategic tool for
instrumental democracy. In turn, as in Cote d'Ivoire, with the exception of
Africanist Laurent Gbagbo, Gabon and the Central African Republic,
incumbent presidents were always afraid that the French Socialists would
support opposition groups against their governments. In the post Cold War
era, France has used democracy in Africa, merely procedural, as an
instrument to advance its strategic objectives.
 
Instrumental democracy entails the deployment of democratic pretences and
processes as vessels to achieve strategic goals of foreign and hegemonic
forces and actors. In instrumentalized democracies, it is the mere motions,
the procedural, rather than the substantive, established mores or ethical
tenets of democracy that matter. Even in the post Cold War and before it,
the focus of African democracy has been on the procedural. In more recent
times elections in Burundi, through Congo (Brazzaville), Malawi, Togo,
Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, to Equatorial Guinea have been merely going to the
motions to establish dubious validity for incumbent presidencies or even
validate dynastic successions as in Togo and even Gabon. We saw that in
procedural elections Nigeria in the second presumed presidential election
of Olusegun Obasanjo. Those elections were associated tragic human costs in
codified and largely uncodified deaths of many senior and major political
actors. As mind bogging revelations of the corruption entailed in the
massive plans of the state to ensure victory for incumbent Jonathan
administration in the last election have demonstrated, Nigeria is not
immune to the dangers of this genre of democracy.
 
Coming elections in Zimbabwe, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and
Rwanda among others are already compromised even before the polls. The
pretences of electoral observer missions to these democratic charades have
made them accomplices to the hollowing out of democracy in Africa. These
missions also carry a garbage of strategic political influences and cannot
be trusted to be divorced from the political sentiments and directives of
the state sponsors and funding sources of these overhyped bodies.
Democratic consolidation that imply the transfer of power from one
governing party to another is thus a rarity in Africa. Accordingly,
procedural elections, if they are held at all, have historically been the
basis of the one man/one party state and Africa's re-invention of its genre
of patrimonial governance during the Cold War era. In the post Cold War
era, the fledging post one party and post one man state (POPS/POMS) in
Africa is associated with neo-patrimonial state and governance paradigm in
the post Cold War. Neo patrimonial governance in the post Cold War expends
some time and energy to appear to be constitutional rule. So procedural
elections have become the order of the day. Instrumental democracy involves
the subtle engagement of interested outside forces, often neo-colonial and
hegemonic forces, in the deployment of sham elections or exploit or in fact
generate crisis in the elections to seek the validation of dubious
electoral outcomes that advance their strategic objectives in that target
country.
 
In this elections, Gabon and the Bongo family literally have gone full
cycle as France seeks to remove Ali Bongo from office. In 2009, France,
full throated its validation of the election of Ali Bongo, was criticized
for its partiality in favour of the dynasty. At least three fatalities were
registered in demonstration against French intervention in that election.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy was one of the earliest to congratulate
Ali Bongo and wishe him success. Before Ali Bongo, Gabon had had only two
presidents since independence from France in 1960. Leo Mba was elected
president in 1961. His paternalistic and authoritarian rule was premised on
national unity and Gabon’s dependence on France
<https://www.britannica.com/place/France>. In early 1964, he was restored
to power by French troops following a military uprising by the Gabonese
<https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gabonese> army. He was sustained in
office by the French military until his death in 1967. Bongo was thereafter
installed by the French in 1967. He also remained loyal to the French until
the very end in 2009. Ali Bongo has been the first to deviate from the
arrangement. Gabon is to France in Central Africa what Cote d'Ivoire is to
it in West Africa. The stakes of France in keeping secured its main
beefsteak in Central Africa are therefore high in Gabon. This has
influenced its pro Jean Ping pronouncements in the evolving conundrum in
Gabon.
 
Albert Bernard Alhaji Omar Odimba Bongo was a major force within the
FrancAfrique network. Gabon has a population of approximately 1.5 million.
Approximately 73 percent of the population, including noncitizens, are
Christians, including the syncretistic Bwiti; 12 percent practice Islam (of
whom 80 to 90 percent are foreigners); 10 percent practice traditional
indigenous religious beliefs exclusively; and 5 percent practice no
religion or are atheists <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheists>. Given
the low population density and Omar Bongo's reputed indifference to the
welfare of the population, he and cronies around him were very rich. He
had oil and was generous to the French establishment, to both the ruling
parties and the opposition. Crude oil accounts for about 50 per cent of the
country's GDP. According to a 2008 statistical Energy Survey by BP, Gabon
had proven oil reserves of 1.995 billion barrels (0.16% of the world's
reserve) at the end of 2007 and produced 230 thousand barrels a day for the
same period. Since then, Gabon has discovered new oil fields. Gabon's low
population density, abundant petroleum, and foreign private investment have
helped to make it one of the most prosperous countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-Saharan_Africa>, with the 4th highest Human
Development I <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index>ndex
and the third highest GDP per capita in Africa. The Americans, French,
British and the rest of Western Europe beneficiary of the corruption and
profligacy of the regime protected Omar Bongo against the will of his
people. But France was the approved gendarme to assure the continued flow
of oil to the West. More than half of the crude oil from Gabon is exported
to the United States of America. The rest is destined to Western Europe.
France's military base in Gabon is of great strategic import for French
control of West and Central Africa.
 
Democracy or not, France has therefore been the muscular guarantor of
regime continuity in Gabon. But Omar Bongo played his part well. Mark Doyle
of the BBC noted that Omar Bongo's one man rule was successful in co-opting
of the opposition - using the country's considerable oil revenues to grease
the path to power.” He pacified the opposition by bribing his opponents.
In the circumstances, the well planned policy and agreement with France on
dynastic succession went relatively smooth in the transition from Pa Albert
Bernard Omar Bongo to Ali Bongo. In 2009, candidate and son Ali Bongo
obtained just 42% of the vote. In Gabon's first past the post elections
rule that was enough to win him the presidency. His two main challengers –
Mba Obame and Pierre Mamboudou each gained around 25% of the 628,000
registered voters
<http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2016/07/13/presidentielle-gabonaise-qui-sont-les-dix-huit-qui-esperent-battre-ali-bongo_4969168_3212.html?xtmc=gabon&xtcr=15>.
Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>: Sep 10 06:18PM

From: Vickers Vickers <mvic...@mvickers.plus.com<mailto:mvic...@mvickers.plus.com>>
Date: Saturday, September 10, 2016 at 1:12 PM
To: Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu<mailto:toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>>, dialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:USAAfricaDi...@googlegroups.com>>, Yoruba Affairs <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com<mailto:yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>>
Cc: Odia Ofeimun <odi...@yahoo.com<mailto:odia55...@yahoo.com>>, "S.O. UWAIFO" <so_u...@yahoo.co.uk<mailto:so_u...@yahoo.co.uk>>
Subject: THANK YOU‹Re: Odia Ofeimun on Okpewho
 
 
Odia, My oh my.
Thank you for your splendid
Eulogy and Celebration of Okpewho.
You have taken us deep.
My perception has been dispersed and slight;
Just enough many years ago to spot Solid Gold
Gleaming in the Horizon Light
 
What you have evoked/ reminded us of, is the true heart-quality of a people
—those who live within the boundaries of the many lands and folk of
that which IS today Nigeria. What immense and precious valuables are stored therein;
And in profusion.
 
How very important it is that these valuables come forward in Nigeria.
And the sooner the better. It is a savage rebuke that such vital root contributions,
Remain relegated to the shadows.
 
If our Oil Oligarchs & Petrol Princes remain determined that the
Nigeria of Lugard should retain its current shape and form and structures;
Then they need to recognise that it is the cultural and creative/ intellectual content
Produced by such folk as Okpewho—and so many others—that provides the sole glue that can ensure durable bonding of the constituent elements.
 
Thank you Okpewho, and Ofeimun, and Falola.
And also Univ of Rochester Press, for Okpewho's recent Blood on the Tides;
And the promise of a sizeable volume of collected essays to come.
I am most humbly grateful.
 
mv
 
From: Prof Toyin FALOLA <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu<mailto:toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>>
Date: Saturday, 10 September 2016 15:05
To: USA-AFRICA dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com<mailto:usaafricadi...@googlegroups.com>>, Yoruba Affairs <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com<mailto:yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>>
Cc: Odia OFEIMUN <odi...@yahoo.com<mailto:odia55...@yahoo.com>>
Subject: Odia Ofeimun on Okpewho
 
ISIDORE OKPEWHO: Scribal Lord of Orature (November 9, 1941- September 4, 2016)
By
Odia Ofeimun
 
It is truly sad news that Isidore Okpewho, unforgettably warm-hearted, civilized, accommodating and a gentleman without humbug, has passed on at the age of 74. A professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton since 1991, and a President of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA), he is acclaimed, across the world, as a virtuoso performer among authoritative figures in the research, practice and teaching of oral literature. After a First Class Honours degree in Classics from the University of Ibadan, he began his career in publishing at Longmans Nigeria where, as an unpublished poet seeking outlet, I first met him.
Affable, and genuinely serious-minded, Isidore left publishing for the University of Denvers, USA, to get his Phd which he capped with a D.Litt at the University of London. He returned to publishing at Longman publishers but pulled back to Academia, teaching for fourteen years at the University of Ibadan, his alma mater, before returning to the United states where his academic career had started sixteen years earlier at the University of New York at Buffalo (1974-76). A year at Havard University in (1990-91) convinced him to remain in the United states at a time when Nigerian academics under military dictatorship were being sacked for teaching what they were not paid to teach, and were being paid pittance for a take-home that could not take them home.
As a creative writer, novelist, poet and literary critic, Isidore Okpewho made reaching for perfection a great reason for being around in any genre or discipline. Always with an inter-disciplinary focus, he refused to follow the herd. Once he made a commitment, he ploughed his own furrow and refused to be distracted by praise or rebuke. Formidable in every sense, his intellectual prowess always had an intimidating edge that he never flaunted even when lesser mortals over-rated themselves. His output as a writer, a veritable master of cultural literacy, has had few parallels. He was the kind of scholar that other long-standing professors would say: when I grow up, I want to be like him.
This was the result of his outstanding performance in two seminal, paradigm-changing works of scholarship The Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance (1979) and Myth in Africa: A Study of Its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance (1983) which gave him not just a head start as a master in the study of oral literature but a special vantage as an interrogator and formulator of theories of knowledge and humanistic studies that primed Africa as a centre of civilization in her own right.
The works dredged the commonality of human reflexes at the base of aesthetic production between different races and nationalities. Given his knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman Culture, there was a solid substructure upon which he built a highly universalist temper. In a lot of ways, it explains his grasp and forthright engagement of the grand theories of modernist and post-modernist scholarship and consequently, his concern with the interconnectivity of narratives of knowledge systems which proves his quintessential mark as a scholar.
Generally, not being a nativist, Isidore Okpewho stood with African civilization without allowing multiple, incongruous, moralities to influence his reception and judgement of other climes. As a classicist, with deep immersion in ancient civilizations, he knew how not to let the bragging propensities that go with all cultural geographies, especially imperial ones, to lay exclusive claims to human values that cut across cultural boundaries. Particularly, in The Epic in Africa, he uncovered for serious engagement the reality that the oral and scribal cultures of the world share common principles of poetic composition in too many respects to warrant the parochial necessity to privilege one civilization above the other.
His Myth in Africa re-drew the map of scholarship in relation to received Western notions that distanced Africa from other cultures on the question of mythologies and mythmaking in general. Based on fieldwork in various parts of Nigeria, especially in the Igbo and Ijaw parts of the Benin Delta, and drawing on researches in other parts of Africa, he formulated an aestheticist theory which invoked performance in the arts as plausible transformers of the way societies behave or change modalities of action.
For an Urhobo whose mother was Asaba, it may well be said that he had to have a keen appreciation of cultural diversities and their interactions as the grit of his vocation. I recall interviewing him about this in Morocco, during an African Literature Association (ALA) conference on his book, Once Upon A Kingdom, which deals with the relationship between the Benin Kingdom and their cultural siblings on the West of the Niger. Even where we differed, I thoroughly enjoyed the ease with which he could immerse himself in local cultures and then link them to universal themes such as the incipient rise and rise of ethnic nationalism. It was after Once Upon a Kingdom that he began to dredge the racial memory of African Americans, addressing and seeking redress for collective psychologies of grandchildren who, in their sub-conscious, were living through ferments in ancestral Africa that even their fathers could not intuit, but they had to resolve before they could tackle the civil rights issues of their day.
Racial memory, as he has threshed it, is not just about what happened to the enslaved through the Middle Passage, the gore after the landing, and the blithe summer of the freeborn without a memory of slavery. This came out quite well in his novel, Call Me By My Rightful Name in which he literally romped through ancient Ekiti dialect of the Yoruba language and Culture with an effortless pitch that told of the harrowing dislocation which slavery wreaked on both sides of the Atlantic; right into the civil rights movements of O we shall overcome.
On this score, it is quite a treat to follow his deep historical and anthropological insights, in full fictional flight, as depicted in this novel. The point, so creatively and poignantly woven into Call Me By My Rightful Name, is that even those in the new world whose parents had no physical contact with Africa could be so implicated in what happened in Africa before Trans-Atlantic enslavement. It simply calls for the tie between homeland and Diaspora to be studiously kept alive in order to have clear perspectives on how to go in a divided world.
The beauty of it is that Okpewho's novels and general literary creativity, while benefitting from so many diverse associations, maintain simple, absorbing touches of empathy. This is even-handedly displayed in the Victims, dealing with the question of polygamy, The Last Duty, on the travails of the civil war outside Biafra, and his penultimate, Tides, which deploys a superb epistolary form to unearth threats of environmental biocide and political insipidity in the face of sheer homicide in Nigeria's Niger Delta. The novels, with truly folkloric zeal, read like conversations between friends celebrating the resilience of the individual spirit in times of collective disorientation. We meet an author who is at home with the innocence of childhood and the rueful world of the grown up in equally hapless situations.
Never to be down-graded is that Isidore Okpewho was, first and foremost, a teacher. On this counterpane, his ground setter for the study of Oral literature was his 1992 book, African Oral Literature: Background, Character, and Continuity (Indiana University Presss). Quite an ambitious take, after it, was the elevating concern that yielded the grand collaboration with Ali Mazrui and Carol Boyce Davies in editing the path-breaking and incomparable book The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (Indiana University Press, (1999). Consequently, the great pull of Isidore Okpewho's scholarship into the 21st Century was building up and assessing the dimensions and directions of linkages between Africa and the African Diaspora. It added a twist to his academic interests and a broadening of those interests to accommodate Africans outside Africa in terms of their interaction with the continent.
May I note that, sad as it is to miss him, I am more like wanting to raise a shout for a man who was dogged in always doing things so right that whatever one remembers of him brings out vintage heartiness. He was a classicist and anthropologist, always able to put his knowledge of ancient and modern times to good account without being fazed by the new fangled theories of modernism and post-modernism. Forever on top of aesthetic seepages and values that help in configuring national and cross-national identities, he gave the arts their due not as passive but active elements in how people perceive social and cultural spaces. For him, it was ever about knowledge and its shared valuation.
As G.G. Darah reminded us in his tribute, Isidore Okpewho's passing away hits home with Hampate Ba's appreciation of how it is like a whole library burnt down when an old man dies. It is a tragedy spelt at the level of the knowledge industry. This is especially the case when one considers that the critical mass of intellect that was driven out of the country in the eighties into the nineties, is thinning out, and continues to haunt us with sheer opportunity costs and, worst of all, terminal cases of loss.
Irony of ironies, it makes it imperative, to celebrate the fact that, but for his relocation to the United States, his chance of surviving up to the age of 74 and with the high level of intellectual production that has accompanied his artistic and academic odyssey, would have been so much less prodigious. This touches the issue of how much greater Nigeria would have been in the comity of knowledge-driven nations if all those Nigerian masters of the Word in the United states were all at home and producing.
To think of it! One realizes how our society never creates good opportunities to celebrate the real avatars in our midst until too late. It rankles because, in a country without regular literary journals and the necessary soirees that give contemporary arts their great moments, yes, in a society in which those who ruined the economy and the university system are still having a great showing in the public space as if waiting to be given laurels for their destructive engagements, whole armies of our best minds are still being driven off-shore. It makes past encounters that were of little moment, when they first occurred, to begin to spring wider associations.
Surely, one such moment I cant forget was during the burial of Isidore Okpewho's mother at Asaba. It was like a convergence of the Nigerian literati in solidarity with him. Dancing through the streets with the ritual carriage on his head, he was acknowledging our toasting of his scion-ship in ceremonial fashion. Suddenly, he veered off and brought the funeral throng in a virtual stampede to where I stood on the other side of the road. Stomping around me, he lunged, without preambles, into an argument, about an opinion I had just expressed, that weekend, in my Guardian Review of his book, Myth in Africa. It was a review, now part of my book, A House of Many Mansions, which Stanley Macebuh and Yemi Ogunbiyi had thrust upon me as a test of intellectual nerve. Coming face to face with the author on the streets of Asaba, I found I had to step obligingly to the beat of the ceremonial drums, while we entered this intense argument about his aestheticist theory of myth.
The drums and gongs were pounding away. Around us, the women sang and danced and stomped along with us, as we punched the air from one leg of the argument to the other. But the man of ideas was intent on slugging it out over my insistence that a myth without ritual becomes mere metaphor. As ever, full of erudition, he conceded the point but refused to accept the implication I drew from it. Using one example after another, he kept reiterating the view that I missed the point he was making in his book.
I still cant stop laughing each time I recall that some people thought our argument, which the drums were contesting, and his dancing around me, were part of the funeral ritual. He made it look that way to justify his moving the funeral throng off its course. With some embarrassment, I kept nudging him about my not wanting to disrupt the ceremony. He shrugged it off. It was his ken to lead the funeral throng to where it had to go. So we argued some more before I literally had to run from the scene because I was beginning to enjoy the arguments. Surely, it was an incident that we were not going to run away from or let become a mere metaphor. We had to re-enact it again, and gave it ritual content when, some years later, once upon a visit to the United states, I grey-hounded a nightbus journey from NY to Cornel and then to Binghamton, to see him.
We, sure, had another, but more conversational jig, after attending a lecture by Amiri Baraka, who was the visiting lecturer at a University event on that day. We talked about projects and tasks confronting African writers and scholars, a subject on which he never stopped reminding me of Professor Abiola Irele one of the few great legends of his standing, whose passion on the subject of pooling knowledge for Africa, rises from romance to sheer myth in the face of a society at home that seems too far gone. Assuredly, in fine
Michael Vickers <mvic...@mvickers.plus.com>: Sep 10 07:12PM +0100

> And the promise of a sizeable volume of collected essays to come.
> I am most humbly grateful.
 
> mv
 
From: Prof Toyin FALOLA <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Date: Saturday, 10 September 2016 15:05
To: USA-AFRICA dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>, Yoruba
Affairs <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Odia OFEIMUN <odi...@yahoo.com>
Subject: Odia Ofeimun on Okpewho
 
ISIDORE OKPEWHO: Scribal Lord of Orature (November 9, 1941- September 4,
2016)
By
Odia Ofeimun

It is truly sad news that Isidore Okpewho, unforgettably warm-hearted,
civilized, accommodating and a gentleman without humbug, has passed on at
the age of 74. A professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton
since 1991, and a President of the International Society for the Oral
Literatures of Africa (ISOLA), he is acclaimed, across the world, as a
virtuoso performer among authoritative figures in the research, practice
and teaching of oral literature. After a First Class Honours degree in
Classics from the University of Ibadan, he began his career in publishing at
Longmans Nigeria where, as an unpublished poet seeking outlet, I first met
him.
Affable, and genuinely serious-minded, Isidore left publishing for the
University of Denvers, USA, to get his Phd which he capped with a D.Litt at
the University of London. He returned to publishing at Longman publishers
but pulled back to Academia, teaching for fourteen years at the University
of Ibadan, his alma mater, before returning to the United states where his
academic career had started sixteen years earlier at the University of New
York at Buffalo (1974-76). A year at Havard University in (1990-91)
convinced him to remain in the United states at a time when Nigerian
academics under military dictatorship were being sacked for teaching what
they were not paid to teach, and were being paid pittance for a take-home
that could not take them home.
As a creative writer, novelist, poet and literary critic, Isidore Okpewho
made reaching for perfection a great reason for being around in any genre or
discipline. Always with an inter-disciplinary focus, he refused to follow
the herd. Once he made a commitment, he ploughed his own furrow and refused
to be distracted by praise or rebuke. Formidable in every sense, his
intellectual prowess always had an intimidating edge that he never flaunted
even when lesser mortals over-rated themselves. His output as a writer, a
veritable master of cultural literacy, has had few parallels. He was the
kind of scholar that other long-standing professors would say: when I grow
up, I want to be like him.
 
This was the result of his outstanding performance in two seminal,
paradigm-changing works of scholarship The Epic in Africa: Toward a
Poetics of the Oral Performance (1979) and Myth in Africa: A Study of Its
Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance (1983) which gave him not just a head start
as a master in the study of oral literature but a special vantage as an
interrogator and formulator of theories of knowledge and humanistic studies
that primed Africa as a centre of civilization in her own right.
 
The works dredged the commonality of human reflexes at the base of aesthetic
production between different races and nationalities. Given his knowledge of
ancient Greek and Roman Culture, there was a solid substructure upon which
he built a highly universalist temper. In a lot of ways, it explains his
grasp and forthright engagement of the grand theories of modernist and
post-modernist scholarship and consequently, his concern with the
interconnectivity of narratives of knowledge systems which proves his
quintessential mark as a scholar.
Generally, not being a nativist, Isidore Okpewho stood with African
civilization without allowing multiple, incongruous, moralities to influence
his reception and judgement of other climes. As a classicist, with deep
immersion in ancient civilizations, he knew how not to let the bragging
propensities that go with all cultural geographies, especially imperial
ones, to lay exclusive claims to human values that cut across cultural
boundaries. Particularly, in The Epic in Africa, he uncovered for serious
engagement the reality that the oral and scribal cultures of the world share
common principles of poetic composition in too many respects to warrant the
parochial necessity to privilege one civilization above the other.
 
His Myth in Africa re-drew the map of scholarship in relation to received
Western notions that distanced Africa from other cultures on the question of
mythologies and mythmaking in general. Based on fieldwork in various parts
of Nigeria, especially in the Igbo and Ijaw parts of the Benin Delta, and
drawing on researches in other parts of Africa, he formulated an
aestheticist theory which invoked performance in the arts as plausible
transformers of the way societies behave or change modalities of action.
For an Urhobo whose mother was Asaba, it may well be said that he had to
have a keen appreciation of cultural diversities and their interactions as
the grit of his vocation. I recall interviewing him about this in Morocco,
during an African Literature Association (ALA) conference on his book, Once
Upon A Kingdom, which deals with the relationship between the Benin Kingdom
and their cultural siblings on the West of the Niger. Even where we
differed, I thoroughly enjoyed the ease with which he could immerse himself
in local cultures and then link them to universal themes such as the
incipient rise and rise of ethnic nationalism. It was after Once Upon a
Kingdom that he began to dredge the racial memory of African Americans,
addressing and seeking redress for collective psychologies of grandchildren
who, in their sub-conscious, were living through ferments in ancestral
Africa that even their fathers could not intuit, but they had to resolve
before they could tackle the civil rights issues of their day.
Racial memory, as he has threshed it, is not just about what happened to
the enslaved through the Middle Passage, the gore after the landing, and
the blithe summer of the freeborn without a memory of slavery. This came out
quite well in his novel, Call Me By My Rightful Name in which he literally
romped through ancient Ekiti dialect of the Yoruba language and Culture
with an effortless pitch that told of the harrowing dislocation which
slavery wreaked on both sides of the Atlantic; right into the civil rights
movements of O we shall overcome.
 
On this score, it is quite a treat to follow his deep historical and
anthropological insights, in full fictional flight, as depicted in this
novel. The point, so creatively and poignantly woven into Call Me By My
Rightful Name, is that even those in the new world whose parents had no
physical contact with Africa could be so implicated in what happened in
Africa before Trans-Atlantic enslavement. It simply calls for the tie
between homeland and Diaspora to be studiously kept alive in order to have
clear perspectives on how to go in a divided world.
The beauty of it is that Okpewho's novels and general literary creativity,
while benefitting from so many diverse associations, maintain simple,
absorbing touches of empathy. This is even-handedly displayed in the
Victims, dealing with the question of polygamy, The Last Duty, on the
travails of the civil war outside Biafra, and his penultimate, Tides, which
deploys a superb epistolary form to unearth threats of environmental biocide
and political insipidity in the face of sheer homicide in Nigeria's Niger
Delta. The novels, with truly folkloric zeal, read like conversations
between friends celebrating the resilience of the individual spirit in times
of collective disorientation. We meet an author who is at home with the
innocence of childhood and the rueful world of the grown up in equally
hapless situations.
Never to be down-graded is that Isidore Okpewho was, first and foremost, a
teacher. On this counterpane, his ground setter for the study of Oral
literature was his 1992 book, African Oral Literature: Background,
Character, and Continuity (Indiana University Presss). Quite an ambitious
take, after it, was the elevating concern that yielded the grand
collaboration with Ali Mazrui and Carol Boyce Davies in editing the
path-breaking and incomparable book The African Diaspora: African Origins
and New World Identities (Indiana University Press, (1999). Consequently,
the great pull of Isidore Okpewho's scholarship into the 21st Century was
building up and assessing the dimensions and directions of linkages between
Africa and the African Diaspora. It added a twist to his academic interests
and a broadening of those interests to accommodate Africans outside Africa
in terms of their interaction with the continent.
May I note that, sad as it is to miss him, I am more like wanting to raise a
shout for a man who was dogged in always doing things so right that whatever
one remembers of him brings out vintage heartiness. He was a classicist and
anthropologist, always able to put his knowledge of ancient and modern times
to good account without being fazed by the new fangled theories of modernism
and post-modernism. Forever on top of aesthetic seepages and values that
help in configuring national and cross-national identities, he gave the arts
their due not as passive but active elements in how people perceive social
and cultural spaces. For him, it was ever about knowledge and its shared
valuation.
 
As G.G. Darah reminded us in his tribute, Isidore Okpewho's passing away
hits home with Hampate Ba's appreciation of how it is like a whole library
burnt down when an old man dies. It is a tragedy spelt at the level of the
knowledge industry. This is especially the case when one considers that
the critical mass of intellect that was driven out of the country in the
eighties into the nineties, is thinning out, and continues to haunt us with
sheer opportunity costs and, worst of all, terminal cases of loss.
Irony of ironies, it makes it imperative, to celebrate the fact that, but
for his relocation to the United States, his chance of surviving up to the
age of 74 and with the high level of intellectual production that has
accompanied his artistic and academic odyssey, would have been so much less
prodigious. This touches the issue of how much greater Nigeria would have
been in the comity of knowledge-driven nations if all those Nigerian masters
of the Word in the United states were all at home and producing.
 
To think of it! One realizes how our society never creates good
opportunities to celebrate the real avatars in our midst until too late. It
rankles because, in a country without regular literary journals and the
necessary soirees that give contemporary arts their great moments, yes, in a
society in which those who ruined the economy and the university system are
still having a great showing in the public space as if waiting to be given
laurels for their destructive engagements, whole armies of our best minds
are still being driven off-shore. It makes past encounters that were of
little moment, when they first occurred, to begin to spring wider
associations.
Surely, one such moment I cant forget was during the burial of Isidore
Okpewho's mother at Asaba. It was like a convergence of the Nigerian
literati in solidarity with him. Dancing through the streets with the
ritual carriage on his head, he was acknowledging our toasting of his
scion-ship in ceremonial fashion. Suddenly, he veered off and brought the
funeral throng in a virtual stampede to where I stood on the other side of
the road. Stomping around me, he lunged, without preambles, into an
argument, about an opinion I had just expressed, that weekend, in my
Guardian Review of his book, Myth in Africa. It was a review, now part of my
book, A House of Many Mansions, which Stanley Macebuh and Yemi Ogunbiyi had
thrust upon me as a test of intellectual nerve. Coming face to face with the
author on the streets of Asaba, I found I had to step obligingly to the beat
of the ceremonial drums, while we entered this intense argument about his
aestheticist theory of myth.
The drums and gongs were pounding away. Around us, the women sang and danced
and stomped along with us, as we punched the air from one leg of the
argument to the other. But the man of ideas was intent on slugging it out
over my insistence that a myth without ritual becomes mere metaphor. As
ever, full of erudition, he conceded the point but refused to accept the
implication I drew from it. Using one example after another, he kept
reiterating the view that I missed the point he was making in his book.
I still cant stop laughing each time I recall that some people thought our
argument, which the drums were contesting, and his dancing around me, were
part of the funeral ritual. He made it look that way to justify his moving
the funeral throng off its course. With some embarrassment, I kept nudging
him about my not wanting to disrupt the ceremony. He shrugged it off. It was
his ken to lead the funeral throng to where it had to go. So we argued some
more before I literally had to run from the scene because I was beginning to
enjoy the arguments. Surely, it was an incident that we were not going to
run away from or let become a mere metaphor. We had to re-enact it again,
and gave it ritual content when, some years later, once upon a visit to the
United states, I grey-hounded a nightbus journey from NY to Cornel and
then to Binghamton, to see him.
We, sure, had another, but more conversational jig, after attending a
lecture by Amiri Baraka, who was the visiting lecturer at a University
event on that day. We talked about projects and tasks confronting African
writers and scholars, a subject on which he never stopped reminding me of
Professor Abiola Irele one of the few great legends of his standing, whose
passion on the subject of pooling knowledge for Africa, rises from romance
to sheer myth in the face of a society at home that seems too far gone.
Assuredly, in fine intellectual fettle, still talking like a Senior Boy from
St Patricks Asaba where he had his secondary school education, Isidore had
the assurance of someone with so much work still to be done. Although he was
recuperating from an illness, also because his wife, Obiageli, was away to
see one or other of their four children Ediru, Ugo, Afigo, and Onome, we
could talk a little far into the night. It was our last meeting.
I had promised to return to Binghamton again when I would be able to meet
the whole family and if need be re-enact the jig. But as such promises go,
time disposed otherwise. Here we are. On September 4, 2016, he was gone.
The great part is that, as a creative writer and scholar, Isidore Okpewho,
wrote his hands black and left so much that can save many lifetimes, many
generations to come, from the wastage that would have hounded their
endeavours but for the humungous scholarship that he has left as guard and
guide. He was always the great mind, who moved from oceanic dimensions to
brooks without losing his swimmingly authoritative stride and stature.
 
He won the 1976 African Arts Prize for Literature and, in 1993, the
Commonwealth Writers¹ Prize for Best Book Africa. His prestigious
fellowships in the humanities include "the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars (1982), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (1982), Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1988), the W.E.B.
Du Bois Institute at Harvard (1990), National Humanities Center in North
Carolina (1997), and the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2003). He was
also elected Folklore Fellow International by the Finnish Academy of the
Sciences in Helsinki
Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso <jum...@gmail.com>: Sep 09 04:16PM -0700

Mighty congratulations to you, Prof Dasylva! A God-fearing, principled intellectual, Your stellar reputation precedes you and it is fitting that your contributions to humanity are recognised in this way. I have learnt so much from you in the short time of interaction online, and I believe that even greater recognitions await you. More blessings sir.
Jumoke
aoye...@comcast.net: Sep 10 12:23AM

Dear Prof. Dasylva,
 
 
 
 
Hearty congratulations! This is a recognition of your selfless and outstanding service to the academy and commitment to excellence. Very well-deserved! I am confident that many more accolades will come your way.
 
 
 
 
Best wishes,
 
Adebayo Oyebade
Segun Ogungbemi <segun...@gmail.com>: Sep 09 10:22PM -0500

Congratulations my good friend. You are a quiet and silent achiever. You make a lot of sacrifice for us and the Irunmole take note. When the time for Olodumare to reward you came he caused them to sleep so that none among them would claim the source and authority that gave you the award.
Yemoja says many more are coming your way this year. Aase Edumare.
SO
 
Sent from my iPhone
 
Segun Ogungbemi <segun...@gmail.com>: Sep 09 10:47PM -0500

Congratulations my good friend. You are a quiet and silent achiever. You make a lot of sacrifice everywhere you are called to serve humanity. I tell you what, the Irunmole take note. When the time for Olodumare to reward you came he caused them to sleep so that none among them would claim the source and authority that gave you the award.
Yemoja says many more are coming your way this year. Aase Edumare.
Sent from my iPhone
 
Bola Dauda <bola...@hotmail.com>: Sep 10 06:29AM

Please enjoy it all, my friend. There is no word to express how much you and your good works, humility and cheeky mischiefs are appreciated and recognised. Although you are my old enemy, I want to assure you that all the people who have sent you messages truly mean the letters and spirits of their congratulatory messages. We all love and appreciate YOU! Again, Congratulations and all the best for the future. Bola Dauda and family.
 
Sent from my Infinix
 
On Sep 10, 2016 4:06 AM, Ademola Dasylva <dasy...@gmail.com> wrote:
I cannot thank USAAFRICADIALOGUE and Yoruba Affairs twin-family enough for your love, prayers and encouragement. So overwhelming that I blushed several times over. It is amazing and humbling to see, feel and know the extent of being genuinely loved by the best of good people and great minds like you. To be candid, I hardly felt noticed in my life, except now, through your individual encomium. I have always simply lived my normal life. So one can imagine the way I felt, and still feel, as I read through the chain of accolades! I am encouraged to do more for as long as I live, to the glory of God.
 
May God, the Author of all good things, and bestows honor, be the center of your lives and homes!
 
I thank the management of Redeemer's University for the Award, and I appreciate the University of Ibadan which made me the pioneer recipient of similar Award in the institution, in 2012. Thank you all.
E se pupo.
 
Ademola O. Dasylva?.
 
Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
Ademola Dasylva <dasy...@gmail.com>: Sep 10 04:06AM +0100

I cannot thank USAAFRICADIALOGUE and Yoruba Affairs twin-family enough for your love, prayers and encouragement. So overwhelming that I blushed several times over. It is amazing and humbling to see, feel and know the extent of being genuinely loved by the best of good people and great minds like you. To be candid, I hardly felt noticed in my life, except now, through your individual encomium. I have always simply lived my normal life. So one can imagine the way I felt, and still feel, as I read through the chain of accolades! I am encouraged to do more for as long as I live, to the glory of God.
 
May God, the Author of all good things, and bestows honor, be the center of your lives and homes!
 
I thank the management of Redeemer's University for the Award, and I appreciate the University of Ibadan which made me the pioneer recipient of similar Award in the institution, in 2012. Thank you all.
 
E se pupo.
 
Ademola O. Dasylva‎.
 
Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
Laolu Akande <akan...@yahoo.com>: Sep 10 09:31AM +0100

Since his days at OSCAS where he taught us Literature, and was our Staff Adviser at the Press Club in the mid eighties, Prof Dasylva has always been a diligent teacher, selfless and exemplary. On behalf of all his old students at Ile Ife, this is congratulating a noble man and worthy teacher. E ku orire o!
 
Laolu A
 
 
 
 
oluyemisi Bamgbose <oluyemis...@hotmail.com>: Sep 10 09:56AM +0100

Professor Dasylva. Well deserved award. In the University of Ibadan we are so proud of u. You are also a pride to many others. Congratulations. Professor Oluyemisi BamgboseFaculty of law. UI
 
 
Sent from my Samsung device
 
-------- Original message --------
From: Segun Ogungbemi <segun...@gmail.com>
Date: 10/09/2016 8:05 am (GMT+01:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Honor for Professor Ademola Dasylva
 
Congratulations my good friend. You are a quiet and silent achiever. You make a lot of sacrifice for us and the Irunmole take note. When the time for Olodumare to reward you came he caused them to sleep so that none among them would claim the source and authority that gave you the award.
Yemoja says many more are coming your way this year. Aase Edumare.
SO
 
Sent from my iPhone
 
 
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Osuntokun <josun...@yahoo.com>: Sep 10 09:27AM +0100

May I join several others in congratulating Ademola for the recognition of his immense contribution to the academic growth and development of the Redeemer's university . I am a witness to your devotion and commitment to the task of making the university one of the best in Nigeria . A university bearing the name of the Redeemer deserves no less a commitment . Our Redeemer is not a debtor , he will repay you a hundred fold . I was not able to witness the conferment of the honor because I was out of the country but I can assure you that you have my very best wishes always. .
 
Regards,
 
Akinjde Osuntokun, Ph.D OON FNAL FHSN
Professor Emeritus of History and International Relations
Bapitan of Oyo
 
 
Osuntokun <josun...@yahoo.com>: Sep 10 09:36AM +0100

This is to join many others in congratulating Toyin for another addition to the string of academic honors and recognitions and encomiums showered on him in recent times .A prophet is without honor in his own country . Perhaps our people will one day see the light and realize that light can not be covered because it will shine through whatever it is covered with . Water does not dry in the hole of a crab your honors will never end .
 
Regards,
 
Akinjde Osuntokun, Ph.D OON FNAL FHSN
Professor Emeritus of History and International Relations
Bapitan of Oyo
 
 
Mark Osama Ighile <mig...@gmail.com>: Sep 10 05:42AM -0700

As someone who has enjoyed the privilege of being taught by Prof Dasylva in the late 1980s at the University of Ibadan, i can boldly say that he merits any outstanding contributions award from any institution in any part of the globe. For someone like me, who was a teaching staff at Rexeemer's University in 2013 when Prof Ademola Dasylva came for his sabbatical at our department, the department of English...the root platform of this award, i believe i am fully qualified and professionally audacious enough to pontificate on the appropriateness of this recognition: Within six months of Professor Dasylva's sojourn at the University, he transforned the Literature Unit of my department and made it the toast of the institution. He then moved on to the GST Unit, and from the bank of his experience as University of Ibadan former Director of GST, he turned the Unit into one of the best technologically powered GST directiorates in any University in Nigeria and beyond. In conjunction with other stakeholders, Prof Dasylva facilitated the commencement of the Departments of Philosphy, French and Christian Religious Studies, and yours sincerely, because of my published interest in Christan religious scholarship, in addition to literature and folklore, was asked to pioneer the CRS Dept. We are talking about a distingushed scholar and seasoned administrator who in 2013/2014 and 2014/2015 technically served as chief consultant to the Vice Chancellor on virtually every major academic issue. When it became expedient for him to coordinate the college as dean, he took up the challenge with stoic philosophical calmness and Christ-like confidence, not minding whose ox was gored.When he needed to extend his leave by some months for the sake of Redeemer's University, in spite of all the implications, he did not hesitate. Profesor Dasylva would seize every opprtunity to publicise and create collaborative plaforms for the institution. Examples of such efforts are too numerous to mention. I was not told, i did not read them from the papers or gadgets, i was there live! I was his 'Special Personal Assistant and Confidant' when all these monumental achievements were being mooted, processed and activated by him. At the Redemption Camp, his office was adjacent to mine. I noticed that most of the time, when i would be leaving the office at 10.00pm, his office lights would still be on. A pumping engine of ideas, morals, ethical and academic standards. Do i need to state the obvious, that the Toyin Falola international conference that took place at Redeemer's University Ede earlier in the year was entirely the concept and construct of Professor Ademola Omobewaji Dasylva?
I would have been mortally surprised if the Redeemer's University's Oustanding Contributions Award had not gone to him. How do you reward a man who was chairman of several sensitive committees, head of the literature Unit, ditector of the GST Unit and dean of the college, all in one and a half years of sabbatical leave?
If i were still at Redeemer's University i would certainly have read his citation at the award night, for obvious reasons. This short piece therfore, serves as my humble addition to the citation read. I celebrate you, my mentor,for making us proud, as usual!
 
Mark Osama Ighile Ph.D (Ibadan)
Director, Academic Planning
Benson Idahosa University &
Rector, Benson Idahosa
School of Basic & Applied Studies.
Ibigbolade Aderibigbe <gbolaade....@gmail.com>: Sep 10 12:42PM -0400

Congratulations my brother!!! many more laurels to come.
Aderibigbe
 
On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 10:17 AM, Uyilawa Usuanlele <big...@hotmail.com>
wrote:
 
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>: Sep 10 06:59PM +0100

Great, great congratulations, Professor Ademola Dasylva.
 
My experience of him is of a courageous and uncompromising scholar,
terribly demanding.
 
thanks
 
toyin
 
On 9 September 2016 at 15:39, 'Michael Afolayan' via Yoruba Affairs <
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>: Sep 10 06:56PM +0100

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Okwukwe Ibiam o.i...@gmail.com [NaijaObserver] <
NaijaO...@yahoogroups.com>
Date: 9 September 2016 at 16:16
Subject: ||NaijaObserver|| FULANI HERDSMEN SHOULD EMBRACE MODERN CATTLE
REARING METHODS - SENATOR SHEHU SANI
 
 
 
 
 
Senator Sani Asks Fulani To Embrace Modern Cattle Rearing Methods
 
[image: shehu-sani3]
Senator Sani Asks Fulani To Embrace Modern Cattle Rearing Methods
*APGA THINK-TANK: WE CONCUR.*
 
September 8, 2016
 
*-Wants Nomadic Education Commission Scrapped*
 
Idibia Gabriel, Kaduna
 
 
 
Senator representing Kaduna central district, Comrade Shehu Sani, has
called on Fulani people to embrace the reality of 21st century methods of
cattle breeding.
 
He also called for the scrapping of National Commission for Nomadic
Education (NCNE), for non performance.
 
Senator Sani, who made the call in Kaduna when executives of Miyetti Allah
Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN), the umbrella body of
Fulani cattle breeders, paid him a courtesy visit on the issues bordering
Fulani’s in Kaduna, told the group that nomadic method of cattle breeding
has become archaic.
 
“It is high time for them to embrace the reality of 21st century method of
cattle breeding as breeding cattle from one community to other is becoming
out dated”, he said.
 
According to Sani, cattle breeders in other countries of the world “are
producing one million times what they are producing because those countries
embraced, and adapted to, scientific methods of cattle breeding”.
 
The Senator added that science and technology will seriously help Fulani’s
adapt themselves in the 21st century if the State and Federal Government
help then by redirecting their trade of cow milking to modern methods.
 
Sani opined that if those that have been in the position of power in the
past, had used resources and opportunity they had while in power to train
and empower the Fulani with modern cattle farming methods, Nigeria would
not be where it is today.
 
He noted that every year, federal and state governments budget billions of
naira for agriculture but nothing has ever gone to the Fulani.
 
“What is happening with Fulani today is a problem of years of neglect and
indifference by the past successive government of Nigeria.
 
“If the government can set up a Ministry of Niger Delta, and if President
Muhammadu Buhari is considering the idea of setting up a North-East
Development Commission, there is also a need to set up a National
Commission for Nomads in the country which will address issues bordering on
herdsmen.
 
“Government have set up a lot of commissions, such as oil spilling and
border communities, then why not an agency for which issues that borders on
Fulani, generally could be address?
 
“There is no doubt that the problems of the Fulani today is a problem that
bedevilled the country and affects it in a number of ways, which could be
ecological, environmental, political and security. It also bordered on
different areas in our national lives as far as Fulani is concerned.
 
“If I may differ from what you have said in this meeting, I have heard a
lot from killings of your members, arbitrary arrests of your members,
intimidation, kidnappings and all sort of harassments which your people
faced in the last few years.
 
“It is very unfortunates that today, you have raised issues of being
victims but the perception nationally does not in any way portray you as
such. It portrays you from a very bad light. The image of Fulani man today
has been badly battered by a number of things.
 
“Fulani men and women today are perceived as Fulani herdsmen and that is
very unfortunate; these are fundamental issues that touch on your dignity,
integrity, reputation and image of yourselves and those of your children.
 
“Majority of Northerners today are Fulani or Hausa Fulani and Fulani have
been in Nigeria as far as 300 years and I think you are unnecessarily
blamed for the misdeed of very few of you. So I think it will be in your
best interest to categorise your problems and there are issues which the
government can do to address you and there are problems that you alone can
address.
 
“If you have bad eggs within yourselves, who pick arms and raid villages
and kill innocent people, then you have a duty to support security agencies
to see that those bad eggs, killer herdsmen are dealt with seriously.
 
“It is a reality that you have been neglected, abandoned and marginalized
by successive governments for the past 30 years. Many Northern people have
been in power for decades and because of lack of foresight, they failed to
come out with policies and programmes that could have addressed problems of
the Fulani.
 
“The killings of your people have been rampant, Fulani will be killed and
they are blamed for the killing. So, in the areas where you have been
blamed, I think your association has the responsibility to address it; and
for the areas which you have fallen victims, then the government has a duty
to come to your aid. But I think you alone can do a lot to salvage the
image, reputation of the Fulani people by reining in on those persons who
portray themselves as Fulani thereby killing innocent people.
 
“There is lack of report about things that happen to Fulani and I will say
it that there is need for your association to assist government by keeping
a profile of the herdsmen”, he said.
 
The Senator also condemned the existing National Commission for Nomadic
Education, saying it is of no use and no effect to the Fulani.
 
He said despite being set up during General Ibrahim Babangida’s
administration to help educate the Fulani, it has become another redundant
bureaucracy.
 
He said the need to scrap the Commission has become imperative to enable
the government set up a National Commission for Nomads which he said is
needed to be a rallying point for Fulani.
 
Sani also called on President Muhammadu Buhari, being a Fulani, to know
that Fulani’s are suffering and his attention should be as much as he is
interested in ending the problems of Northeast and Niger-Delta.
 
“It is very clear now that in Nigeria, government and the public pay
attention when the states, communities, groups, association take the road
of violence before government think they will sit down and dialogue with
them but when they are calling for attention through peaceful way
government does not pay attention”, he advocated.
 
Secretary to the Women Wing of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association,
Hajiya Khadija Aradido confirmed that Fulani women are in trouble and are
being neglected by their husbands and the government despite being victims
when their husbands are kidnapped or killed.
 
Hajiya Aradido appealed to Senator Sani to, as a matter to urgency, help
Fulani women to set up businesses, skill acquisition even getting educated
as most of them fall victims of rape, abused and unwanted pregnancy during
the hawking.
 
Responding to the Fulani women, Senator Sani asked them to give him some
insight into what he could do to assist them, saying he does not know how
to help the women because they are known for hawking cow milk and have not
been known to do any other business like tailoring, hair dressing, farming
or any trade.
 
__._,_.___
------------------------------
Posted by: Okwukwe Ibiam <o.i...@gmail.com>
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>: Sep 10 06:50PM +0100

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Date: 10 September 2016 at 12:51
Subject: ||NaijaObserver|| Herdsmen: 3,000 women farmers stage protest to
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Herdsmen: 3,000 women farmers stage protest to Ebonyi monarch’s palace
<http://www.cityvoiceng.com/herdsmen-3000-women-farmers-stage-protest-to-ebonyi-monarchs-palace/>
 
 
 
 
Herdsmen: 3,000 women farmers stage protest to Ebonyi monarch’s palace
No fewer than 3,000 Ishiagu women on Friday staged a peaceful protest
against the destruction of farm crops by h...
 
<http://www.cityvoiceng.com/herdsmen-3000-women-farmers-stage-protest-to-ebonyi-monarchs-palace/>
 
 
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"Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooq...@gmail.com>: Sep 10 10:06AM -0400

*By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.*
 
*Twitter: @farooqkperogi <https://twitter.com/farooqkperogi>*
 
 
Last week’s column titled “Ibrahim Waziri: From HND in Nigeria to PhD in
America”
<http://www.farooqkperogi.com/2016/09/ibrahim-waziri-from-hnd-in-nigeria-to.html>
recalled
a column I wrote on December 27, 2009 on the parity of esteem between
polytechnic and university qualifications. Given the interest last week’s
column generated, I’ve decided to share a reworked and updated version of
the article:
 
 
If you are a Nigerian university graduate who has been socialized into
disdaining polytechnics as inferior higher education institutions, think
about this: Albert Einstein, the world’s most renowned physicist and one of
the most influential thinkers of all time, graduated from the Zurich
Polytechnic (now called the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich)
in 1900 with a diploma in mathematics and physics.
 
<https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pHMqVQ2bTVg/V9NX9PEDnzI/AAAAAAAAFGU/JacoVbtbK8ceBd9wZ6h7HIi_YyYTo9bvACLcB/s1600/Albert-Einstein.jpg>
 
 
Unlike in Nigeria, his diploma wasn’t a handicap to his pursuit of
advanced degrees. He studied for and earned his Ph.D. in experimental
physics from the University of Zurich, five years after his diploma. If a
polytechnic produced one of the world’s greatest thinkers, why are
polytechnics so low on the totem pole of post-secondary education in
Nigeria? Why do we reserve ice-cold derision for polytechnic qualifications?
 
 
Well, the answer lies in the different philosophies that informed the
establishment of polytechnics in different countries. In the United States,
“polytechnic universities” and “institutes of technology” are, and have
always been, similar in status and structure to conventional universities.
So they don’t have the reputational baggage that our polytechnics have.
 
 
But the UK tradition of polytechnic education, which we inherited in
Nigeria, intended for polytechnics to be no more than intermediate
technical and vocational schools to train technologists and a lowbrow,
middle-level workforce. So their mandate limited them to offer sub-degree
courses in engineering and applied sciences.
 
 
In time, however, they ventured into the humanities and the social sciences
and then sought to be equated with universities. This request was
grudgingly granted only after the British government set up the Council for
National Academic Awards (CNAA)—composed wholly of people from
universities—to examine and validate the quality of polytechnic
qualifications.
 
 
Nevertheless, in spite of this elaborate institutional quality control
(which had no equivalent for universities) the higher national diploma
(HND) was treated as only the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree “without
honors.” In university administration lingo, only a “pass” degree—the
lowest possible rank in British degree classification—is considered a
degree “without honors.”
 
 
This means that first-class, upper-second-class, lower-second-class and
third-class degrees have “honors” and that the HND is only equivalent to a
“pass” degree. That’s why, traditionally, British universities did not—and
many still do not— admit HND graduates to master’s degree programs (even if
the HND graduates had a distinction in their diploma) without first
requiring them to undergo a one-year remedial postgraduate diploma
program—just like people with “pass” degrees must undergo a remedial
program before being admitted to master’s degree programs.
 
 
This invidious discrimination against polytechnic graduates and manifestly
preferential treatment for university graduates, often called the “Binary
Divide” in UK higher education parlance, predictably gave rise to pervasive
feelings of deep, bitter anger and ill-will in the system.
 
 
So in 1992, under the Further and Higher Education Act, the “binary divide”
was abolished, and all the 35 polytechnics in the UK were elevated to
universities and given powers to award bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D.
degrees. There are no more polytechnics—and the HND qualification— in the
UK.
 
 
Most other countries with British-style binary divides have also
eliminated the distinction between polytechnics and universities to varying
degrees. In Australia, polytechnics were elevated to “universities of
technology” in the 1990s.
 
 
Hong Kong, a former British colony like Nigeria, upgraded its two
polytechnics—The Hong Kong Polytechnic and the City Polytechnic of Hong
Kong—to universities in 1994 and 1995 respectively.
 
 
New Zealand also merged all its polytechnics with existing universities and
allowed only one—Auckland University of Technology (formerly the Auckland
Institute of Technology)—to transmute into a full-fledged university in the
1990s.
 
 
Greece abolished its polytechnics and upgraded them to universities in
2001. In South Africa, from 2004, polytechnics, known as technikons, were
either merged with universities or upgraded to “universities of
technologies,” although with limited rights and privileges.
 
 
In Germany, polytechnics can now, in addition to diplomas, award bachelor’s
and master’s degrees in technical and vocational subjects (and in some
humanities and social science courses such as communication studies,
business and management, etc.) but cannot award PhDs.
 
 
In Sierra Leone, where polytechnic education began only in 2001, the
country’s three polytechnics award bachelor’s degrees in a limited number
of courses, in addition to awarding sub-degree diplomas and certificates.
 
 
Kenya, another former British colony, merged its polytechnics with older
universities and made them degree-awarding institutions since 2009. And
Ghana has announced plans to convert
<http://ghanatrade.gov.gh/Latest-News/turning-polytechnics-into-universities-takes-off-in-2016.html>
its
polytechnics into “technical universities” starting this month.
 
 
In India, Pakistan, and Singapore, polytechnics don’t grant higher
education qualifications; students are admitted to a 3-year diploma program
in technical and vocation fields from what we would call SS1 in Nigeria,
that is, after the 10th year of formal schooling. So Indian, Pakistan, and
Singaporean polytechnics are actually an alternative to traditional
secondary education; they are not higher education institutions like
Nigerian polytechnics are. (India’s “institutes of technology” award
bachelor’s degrees and aren’t the same as “polytechnics.”)
 
 
Malaysia’s premier polytechnic, Ungku Omar Polytechnic, offers bachelor’s
degrees in addition to diplomas and advanced diplomas. Other polytechnics
in the country only offer diplomas and advanced diplomas.
 
 
What the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Hong Kong, Greece, Kenya,
etc. achieved in the 1990s and 2000s— that is, abolition of the often
unfair binary between polytechnic and university qualifications—had been
achieved in Albert Einstein’s polytechnic in 1909, five years after he got
his diploma there. It was, like most other polytechnics in Switzerland,
elevated to a full-fledged university, although it is still fondly called
“Poly” by its students, staff, and alumni to this day.
 
 
Almost no country in the world, except Nigeria, retains the binary divide
between polytechnics and universities. Nigeria has no business being the
lone exception.
 
 
So this is my recommendation to education minister Adamu Adamu: The HND
should be abolished forthwith. However, the OND should be retained to
supply the nation’s middle-level labor pool and to serve as a foundational
qualification for entry into B. Tech. degree programs.
 
 
Small and mid-sized polytechnics should continue to offer the OND and big,
resource-rich polytechnics like Yaba Tech, Kaduna Polytechnic, IMT Enugu,
Federal Poly Auchi, etc. should be upgraded and converted to full-fledged
universities of technology.
 
 
Having taught mass communication on a part-time basis at the Kaduna
Polytechnic 16 years ago, and knowing that polytechnic students are just as
good—and as bad—as university students, I am eager to see Nigeria join the
rest of the world in eliminating the unfair binary divide between
universities and polytechnics.
 
 
As Dr. Waziri’s example shows, we’ve been burying our Einsteins for years.
That has got to stop.
 
 
*Related Articles:*
 
*Ibrahim Waziri: From HND in Nigeria to PhD in America
<http://www.farooqkperogi.com/2016/09/ibrahim-waziri-from-hnd-in-nigeria-to.html>*
 
*HND and American Universities
<http://www.farooqkperogi.com/2009/12/hnd-and-american-universities.html>*
 
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media
Social Science Building
Room 5092 MD 2207
402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
<http://www.farooqkperogi.blogspot.com>
Twitter: @farooqkperog <https://twitter.com/#%21/farooqkperogi>
Author of *Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English
in a Global World
<http://www.amazon.com/Glocal-English-Changing-Linguistics-Semiotics/dp/1433129264/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1436569864&sr=1-1>*
 
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either
proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>: Sep 10 02:05PM

ISIDORE OKPEWHO: Scribal Lord of Orature (November 9, 1941- September 4, 2016)
By
Odia Ofeimun
 
It is truly sad news that Isidore Okpewho, unforgettably warm-hearted, civilized, accommodating and a gentleman without humbug, has passed on at the age of 74. A professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton since 1991, and a President of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA), he is acclaimed, across the world, as a virtuoso performer among authoritative figures in the research, practice and teaching of oral literature. After a First Class Honours degree in Classics from the University of Ibadan, he began his career in publishing at Longmans Nigeria where, as an unpublished poet seeking outlet, I first met him.
Affable, and genuinely serious-minded, Isidore left publishing for the University of Denvers, USA, to get his Phd which he capped with a D.Litt at the University of London. He returned to publishing at Longman publishers but pulled back to Academia, teaching for fourteen years at the University of Ibadan, his alma mater, before returning to the United states where his academic career had started sixteen years earlier at the University of New York at Buffalo (1974-76). A year at Havard University in (1990-91) convinced him to remain in the United states at a time when Nigerian academics under military dictatorship were being sacked for teaching what they were not paid to teach, and were being paid pittance for a take-home that could not take them home.
As a creative writer, novelist, poet and literary critic, Isidore Okpewho made reaching for perfection a great reason for being around in any genre or discipline. Always with an inter-disciplinary focus, he refused to follow the herd. Once he made a commitment, he ploughed his own furrow and refused to be distracted by praise or rebuke. Formidable in every sense, his intellectual prowess always had an intimidating edge that he never flaunted even when lesser mortals over-rated themselves. His output as a writer, a veritable master of cultural literacy, has had few parallels. He was the kind of scholar that other long-standing professors would say: when I grow up, I want to be like him. This was the result of his outstanding performance in two seminal, paradigm-changing works of scholarship The Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance (1979) and Myth in Africa: A Study of Its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance (1983) which gave him not just a head start as a master in the study of oral literature but a special vantage as an interrogator and formulator of theories of knowledge and humanistic studies that primed Africa as a centre of civilization in her own right. The works dredged the commonality of human reflexes at the base of aesthetic production between different races and nationalities. Given his knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman Culture, there was a solid substructure upon which he built a highly universalist temper. In a lot of ways, it explains his grasp and forthright engagement of the grand theories of modernist and post-modernist scholarship and consequently, his concern with the interconnectivity of narratives of knowledge systems which proves his quintessential mark as a scholar.
Generally, not being a nativist, Isidore Okpewho stood with African civilization without allowing multiple, incongruous, moralities to influence his reception and judgement of other climes. As a classicist, with deep immersion in ancient civilizations, he knew how not to let the bragging propensities that go with all cultural geographies, especially imperial ones, to lay exclusive claims to human values that cut across cultural boundaries. Particularly, in The Epic in Africa, he uncovered for serious engagement the reality that the oral and scribal cultures of the world share common principles of poetic composition in too many respects to warrant the parochial necessity to privilege one civilization above the other. His Myth in Africa re-drew the map of scholarship in relation to received Western notions that distanced Africa from other cultures on the question of mythologies and mythmaking in general. Based on fieldwork in various parts of Nigeria, especially in the Igbo and Ijaw parts of the Benin Delta, and drawing on researches in other parts of Africa, he formulated an aestheticist theory which invoked performance in the arts as plausible transformers of the way societies behave or change modalities of action.
For an Urhobo whose mother was Asaba, it may well be said that he had to have a keen appreciation of cultural diversities and their interactions as the grit of his vocation. I recall interviewing him about this in Morocco, during an African Literature Association (ALA) conference on his book, Once Upon A Kingdom, which deals with the relationship between the Benin Kingdom and their cultural siblings on the West of the Niger. Even where we differed, I thoroughly enjoyed the ease with which he could immerse himself in local cultures and then link them to universal themes such as the incipient rise and rise of ethnic nationalism. It was after Once Upon a Kingdom that he began to dredge the racial memory of African Americans, addressing and seeking redress for collective psychologies of grandchildren who, in their sub-conscious, were living through ferments in ancestral Africa that even their fathers could not intuit, but they had to resolve before they could tackle the civil rights issues of their day.
Racial memory, as he has threshed it, is not just about what happened to the enslaved through the Middle Passage, the gore after the landing, and the blithe summer of the freeborn without a memory of slavery. This came out quite well in his novel, Call Me By My Rightful Name in which he literally romped through ancient Ekiti dialect of the Yoruba language and Culture with an effortless pitch that told of the harrowing dislocation which slavery wreaked on both sides of the Atlantic; right into the civil rights movements of O we shall overcome. On this score, it is quite a treat to follow his deep historical and anthropological insights, in full fictional flight, as depicted in this novel. The point, so creatively and poignantly woven into Call Me By My Rightful Name, is that even those in the new world whose parents had no physical contact with Africa could be so implicated in what happened in Africa before Trans-Atlantic enslavement. It simply calls for the tie between homeland and Diaspora to be studiously kept alive in order to have clear perspectives on how to go in a divided world.
The beauty of it is that Okpewho's novels and general literary creativity, while benefitting from so many diverse associations, maintain simple, absorbing touches of empathy. This is even-handedly displayed in the Victims, dealing with the question of polygamy, The Last Duty, on the travails of the civil war outside Biafra, and his penultimate, Tides, which deploys a superb epistolary form to unearth threats of environmental biocide and political insipidity in the face of sheer homicide in Nigeria's Niger Delta. The novels, with truly folkloric zeal, read like conversations between friends celebrating the resilience of the individual spirit in times of collective disorientation. We meet an author who is at home with the innocence of childhood and the rueful world of the grown up in equally hapless situations.
Never to be down-graded is that Isidore Okpewho was, first and foremost, a teacher. On this counterpane, his ground setter for the study of Oral literature was his 1992 book, African Oral Literature: Background, Character, and Continuity(Indiana University Presss). Quite an ambitious take, after it, was the elevating concern that yielded the grand collaboration with Ali Mazrui and Carol Boyce Davies in editing the path-breaking and incomparable book The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (Indiana University Press, (1999). Consequently, the great pull of Isidore Okpewho's scholarship into the 21st Century was building up and assessing the dimensions and directions of linkages between Africa and the African Diaspora. It added a twist to his academic interests and a broadening of those interests to accommodate Africans outside Africa in terms of their interaction with the continent.
May I note that, sad as it is to miss him, I am more like wanting to raise a shout for a man who was dogged in always doing things so right that whatever one remembers of him brings out vintage heartiness. He was a classicist and anthropologist, always able to put his knowledge of ancient and modern times to good account without being fazed by the new fangled theories of modernism and post-modernism. Forever on top of aesthetic seepages and values that help in configuring national and cross-national identities, he gave the arts their due not as passive but active elements in how people perceive social and cultural spaces. For him, it was ever about knowledge and its shared valuation. As G.G. Darah reminded us in his tribute, Isidore Okpewho's passing away hits home with Hampate Ba's appreciation of how it is like a whole library burnt down when an old man dies. It is a tragedy spelt at the level of the knowledge industry. This is especially the case when one considers that the critical mass of intellect that was driven out of the country in the eighties into the nineties, is thinning out, and continues to haunt us with sheer opportunity costs and, worst of all, terminal cases of loss.
Irony of ironies, it makes it imperative, to celebrate the fact that, but for his relocation to the United States, his chance of surviving up to the age of 74 and with the high level of intellectual production that has accompanied his artistic and academic odyssey, would have been so much less prodigious. This touches the issue of how much greater Nigeria would have been in the comity of knowledge-driven nations if all those Nigerian masters of the Word in the United states were all at home and producing. To think of it! One realizes how our society never creates good opportunities to celebrate the real avatars in our midst until too late. It rankles because, in a country without regular literary journals and the necessary soirees that give contemporary arts their great moments, yes, in a society in which those who ruined the economy and the university system are still having a great showing in the public space as if waiting to be given laurels for their destructive engagements, whole armies of our best minds are still being driven off-shore. It makes past encounters that were of little moment, when they first occurred, to begin to spring wider associations.
Surely, one such moment I cant forget was during the burial of Isidore Okpewho's mother at Asaba. It was like a convergence of the Nigerian literati in solidarity with him. Dancing through the streets with the ritual carriage on his head, he was acknowledging our toasting of his scion-ship in ceremonial fashion. Suddenly, he veered off and brought the funeral throng in a virtual stampede to where I stood on the other side of the road. Stomping around me, he lunged, without preambles, into an argument, about an opinion I had just expressed, that weekend, in my Guardian Review of his book, Myth in Africa. It was a review, now part of my book, A House of Many Mansions, which Stanley Macebuh and Yemi Ogunbiyi had thrust upon me as a test of intellectual nerve. Coming face to face with the author on the streets of Asaba, I found I had to step obligingly to the beat of the ceremonial drums, while we entered this intense argument about his aestheticist theory of myth.
The drums and gongs were pounding away. Around us, the women sang and danced and stomped along with us, as we punched the air from one leg of the argument to the other. But the man of ideas was intent on slugging it out over my insistence that a myth without ritual becomes mere metaphor. As ever, full of erudition, he conceded the point but refused to accept the implication I drew from it. Using one example after another, he kept reiterating the view that I missed the point he was making in his book.
I still cant stop laughing each time I recall that some people thought our argument, which the drums were contesting, and his dancing around me, were part of the funeral ritual. He made it look that way to justify his moving the funeral throng off its course. With some embarrassment, I kept nudging him about my not wanting to disrupt the ceremony. He shrugged it off. It was his ken to lead the funeral throng to where it had to go. So we argued some more before I literally had to run from the scene because I was beginning to enjoy the arguments. Surely, it was an incident that we were not going to run away from or let become a mere metaphor. We had to re-enact it again, and gave it ritual content when, some years later, once upon a visit to the United states, I grey-hounded a nightbus journey from NY to Cornel and then to Binghamton, to see him.
We, sure, had another, but more conversational jig, after attending a lecture by Amiri Baraka, who was the visiting lecturer at a University event on that day. We talked about projects and tasks confronting African writers and scholars, a subject on which he never stopped reminding me of Professor Abiola Irele one of the few great legends of his standing, whose passion on the subject of pooling knowledge for Africa, rises from romance to sheer myth in the face of a society at home that seems too far gone. Assuredly, in fine intellectual fettle, still talking like a Senior Boy from St Patricks Asaba where he had his secondary school education, Isidore had the assurance of someone with so much work still to be done. Although he was recuperating from an illness, also because his wife, Obiageli, was away to see one or other of their four children Ediru, Ugo, Afigo, and Onome, we could talk a little far into the night. It was our last meeting.
I had promised to return to Binghamton again when I would be able to meet the whole family and if need be re-enact the jig. But as such promises go, time disposed otherwise. Here we are. On September 4, 2016, he was gone.
The great part is that, as a creative writer and scholar, Isidore Okpewho, wrote his hands black and left so much that can save many lifetimes, many generations to come, from the wastage that would have hounded their endeavours but for the humungous scholarship that he has left as guard and guide. He was always the great mind, who moved from oceanic dimensions to brooks without losing his swimmingly authoritative stride and stature. He won the 1976 African Arts Prize for Literature and, in 1993, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book Africa. His prestigious fellowships in the humanities include "the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1982), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (1982), Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1988), the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard (1990), National Humanities Center in North Carolina (1997), and the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2003). He was also elected Folklore Fellow International by the Finnish Academy of the Sciences in Helsinki (1993).” Not forgetting that he was a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and a recipient of the Nigerian National Merit Award, it is such a good feeling to know that he was honoured while he was at it.; and especially, that hereafter, his life's work remains secured. His essays, a gargantuan production, will not just remain scattered in journals across the world. They have entered the stream of production by Professor Toyin Falola, assessor per excellence, one of the greatest minds that Nigeria has ever produced, who has promised to take the job in hand. Blood on the Tides: The Ozidi Saga and Oral
Chidi Ezegwu <joem...@yahoo.com>: Sep 10 12:09PM

I am wondering how much truth and how much wailing in this piece:
"I still find it funny that most people don't know why Nigeria economy went into recession, they love the incompetent lies of Lai Mohammed about the past government ruining everything. It's also myopic to think that if Jonathan were to still be in power, we would be worse off. The truth about Nigeria's recession is this; it was caused by the president's unguided rhetoric and uncultured body language. Firstly, there is nothing we are buying today that we weren't buying 5 years ago, therefore it's not our purchase that put pressure on Naira but withdrawal of funds by foreign investors. After the election, the president created instability with his unguided statements about how everyone is corrupt and how everyone is going to jail. The instability made foreign investors to liquidate their investment and change their money to dollars. In the process of trying to flee, they were willing to buy dollars at any price, which lead to high exchange dollar rate. Even though some of them were not ready to run away, but want their money in dollars to save their investments from devaluation, the president gave a bad signal by banning deposit of foreign currency into dormiciliary accounts. That was enough for free market believers to see the draconian handwriting on the wall, that was the beginning of dollar rush. To make matters worse, the president came up with another outrageous policy of rationing dollar to certain sectors and blocking many sectors out. That was the nail in the coffin which facilitated the emergence of free FALL. In the end, foreign investors took over $80B out of the economy within a short period and everything went down to free fall. To those who believe it will be worse if Jonathan is still there, you are all wrong. Policy continuity and political stability will not let billions of dollars leave our shores within such tiny time frame. Even though the government might have income shortage, the private sector will weather the storm by their confidence in the market. The fear of the unknown created by PMB is responsible for the economic downturn not low oil price. Interest rate in America is currently at 0.5% while it is 12% in Nigeria. JP Morgan Chase will not mind borrowing $50 billion from Feds at 0.5 and put in Nigeria for return of %2000 profit. Citi bank will do the same, likewise US Bank Corp. Chase gave Buhari warning about the repercussions of his fixing policy before they pulled out, but his illiterate cyber warriors and misseducated e-soldiers said JPMORGAN can go to hell, they no longer believe in economic metrics since their messiah is in charge. Funny enough they are all suffering today because of the stupid policy, but they find relief by blaming it on past administration and Gucci appetite of average Nigerians. For your information, if your president "kontunu" with his unguided rhetoric, Naira will go down to N1000/1 $. But we thank God, he is no longer talking."
Michael Vickers <mvic...@mvickers.plus.com>: Sep 10 10:48AM +0100

> The very best in Value and Character
> That all us human folk can hope to achieve.
 
> Love and much more, Baba M
 
From: Dauda Dauda <bola...@hotmail.com>
Date: Saturday, 10 September 2016 07:29
To: Ademola Dasylva <dasy...@gmail.com>,
"yorubaaffairs+owners@googlegroups.com"
<yorubaaffairs+owners@googlegroups.com>, USA-AFRICA dialogue
<usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Prof Adeyemi Bukola OYENIYI <oyen...@gmail.com>, "voti...@yahoo.com"
<voti...@yahoo.com>, ADEBAYO OYEBADE <aoye...@tnstate.edu>, Gbenga
Dasylva <temitop...@gmail.com>, "ebomo...@yahoo.com"
<ebomo...@yahoo.com>, Prof Toyin FALOLA <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>,
Redeemer's University Vice-Chancellor <v...@run.edu.ng>, Michael Afolayan
<mafo...@yahoo.com>, Oreoluwa Dasylva <dasylva...@gmail.com>,
REGISTRAR REGISTRAR <regi...@run.edu.ng>, Oluwole 2 Dasylva
<odas...@gmail.com>, Prof Vik BAHL <vb...@greenriver.edu>, Dr Olajumoke
YACOB-HALISO <jum...@gmail.com>, Prof Ayandiji Daniel AINA
<diji...@yahoo.com>, Prof Ayo OLUKOTUN <ayo_ol...@yahoo.com>, Adeshina
Afolayan <shina7...@yahoo.com>, "akinalao-gmail. com Alao"
<akin...@gmail.com>, Ezinwanyi Adam <ezii...@gmail.com>,
"kpda...@yahoo.com" <kpda...@yahoo.com>, Samuel Oloruntoba
<soloru...@gmail.com>, Michael VICKERS <mvic...@mvickers.plus.com>,
"v...@mail.ui.edu.ng" <v...@mail.ui.edu.ng>, Yoruba Affairs
<yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>, Prof Segun OGUNGBEMI
<segun...@gmail.com>, Nimi Wariboko <nimi...@msn.com>
Subject: Re: Honor for Professor Ademola Dasylva
 
Please enjoy it all, my friend. There is no word to express how much you and
your good works, humility and cheeky mischiefs are appreciated and
recognised. Although you are my old enemy, I want to assure you that all the
people who have sent you messages truly mean the letters and spirits of
their congratulatory messages. We all love and appreciate YOU! Again,
Congratulations and all the best for the future. Bola Dauda and family.
 
Sent from my Infinix
 
On Sep 10, 2016 4:06 AM, Ademola Dasylva <dasy...@gmail.com> wrote:
I cannot thank USAAFRICADIALOGUE and Yoruba Affairs twin-family enough for
your love, prayers and encouragement. So overwhelming that I blushed several
times over. It is amazing and humbling to see, feel and know the extent of
being genuinely loved by the best of good people and great minds like you.
To be candid, I hardly felt noticed in my life, except now, through your
individual encomium. I have always simply lived my normal life. So one can
imagine the way I felt, and still feel, as I read through the chain of
accolades! I am encouraged to do more for as long as I live, to the glory of
God.
 
May God, the Author of all good things, and bestows honor, be the center of
your lives and homes!
 
I thank the management of Redeemer's University for the Award, and I
appreciate the University of Ibadan which made me the pioneer recipient of
similar Award in the institution, in 2012. Thank you all.
E se pupo.
 
Ademola O. Dasylva.
 
Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
Rex Marinus <rexma...@hotmail.com>: Sep 10 05:03AM

Salimonu Kadiri is the one insisting that Fajuyi had a "death wish" not I. I on the other hand have pointed out that Fajuyi did not wish to die, and if he had a choice on the 29th of July 1966, would not have chosen death. He was killed because he was Francis Adekunle Fajuyi, military governor of Ibadan, and member of the Supreme Military Council who championed the cause of the January 15th coupists vociferously in council. It is all the stuff of fine tragic theatre, this idea of that Fajuyi chose willingly, as a matter of honor, to die with Ironsi. And I'm not averse to good theatre. I am even prepared to accept this at the intellectual level. But the reality is a bit sanguine. The choice of suicide as honorable death reduces the truth of Fajuyi's death. It is false. Both men were killed because they had to be killed by their abductors. They had no choice given to them. But what Salimonu insists that Fajuyi chose an honorable death by accompanying his guest and his General in death, and the illogic of it is that but for Ironsi, Fajuyi would not have been killed. Ironsi was the cause of Fajuyi's death in other words because of his presence in the Government House. If anyone is therefore to be blamed, it must be Ironsi, the cause, rather than the perpetrators of the act of killing who have never earned a word of reprimand from Salimonu. This amounts to blaming the victim, and for what? To prove that Ironsi, an Igbo General, was the great author of the July tragedy by all means, and that Fajuyi, somehow embodying some "Yoruba will" in Salimonu's mind was some innocent, and honorable victim. This is terrible!
 
And I do not know why Ojukwu creeps into this discussion now, and in what context, except again to highlight some ethnic essentialism of which Ojukwu somehow models in Salimonu's mind. The difference between Salimonu Kadiri and me is that I do not equate the individual totally to the group. However, I'll concede that there are some ontological conditions that we absorb by being part of a worldview. This is particularly why I do not understand what he wanted from Ojukwu who had gone to exile, returned and fought heroically to reclaim his place without fear. Perhaps he wanted Ojukwu to commit suicide from leading an army? Well, Ojukwu was Igbo, and among the Igbo suicide is the highest form of abomination. It is not considered heroic. It is considered one of the greatest acts of cowardice to take your own life, and one of the highest 'Nso ala" to take any life at all. So, Salimonu's construction of value must recognize this fact of Igbo life regarding the choices that Ojukwu made, both in going t exile, and in returning to reclaim his place. Ojukwu did not leave the disabled soldiers to shame or reproach. At the end of the war, many of these disabled veterans were retrained, given skills, and provided free housing at the resettlement in Oji River. Many earned their living. No one ever reproached disabled Biafran veterans. Ojukwu fought for their rights to be restored. Among those wounded who had been resettled in Oji River, people constantly, generously provided for them. In any case, Ojukwu was neither the federal government, nor the state governments whose duties it is to create publicly funded programs for wounded war veterans. Ojukwu had many great qualities and many flaws. But what cannot be denied is that he did not cower before anybody. From the moment he returned from exile, he asserted himself. He did not keep quiet on matter concerning the Igbo, Nigerians, or Africans, to the very end. That is the fact, and there is very little you can do to revise this.
 
I think I've dealt with this Osu question. Yu may choose to believe whatever else takes your fancy. But the bottomline is that the Igbo world is a very democratic society, and the Igbo believe that "no condition is permanent." The Igbo have had practices like the ritual disposal of twins, and when confronted with its anti-human dimensions, abrogated it. The Osu was once in some hazy past, an honored situation, but grew over time into some antinomy, and became something of a theological aberration. Recognizing the extent to which the practice associated with Osu had become unjust, the modern Igbo abrogated it through its secular laws. The shrines to which to Osu were once pledged are no more, and therefore the practice of ritual dedication - a sort of living sacrifice - is no more. But yiu choose to believe your fantasies. I am in no position to stop you. But fact is, fo the Igbo, "onye kwe, chi ya ekwe." There is no caste, no class, no condition to which any individual is so moored that they cannot transcend. Social formation is so fluid that as the Igbo themselves say, "Nwata kwoo aka, ya esoro ndi okenye rie nri." If a child washes his hand clean, he partakes in the feats with the elders.
 
And finally to Azikiwe: first, the Ibibio Union was actually formed before the Igbo Union, and among the early beneficiaries of the scholarship of the Ibibio Union were the likes of Eyo Ita. The Ibo Union was formed in Port-Harcourt in 1932, on the occasion of the reception of Dr. Simon Onwu, on his graduation as the first modern Igbo doctor. The Ibo Union also organized the reception for Azikiwe in 1934 in Port-Harcourt under the chairmanship of the Saro-Igbo, Potts-Johnson, who was also publisher of the Observer in Port-Harcourt. I have noted the above to point to the inaccuracy of the assertion that Azikiwe formed the Ibo Union in 1943. Azikiwe joined the NYM in 1937, and in fact drew its charter, with which they confronted Governor General, Bernard Bourdillon, a rather likable, liberal, and supportive colonial officer with whom Azikiwe even had a great relationship. Azikiwe had no problems with leadership in NYM, just with the methods and ideas. Salimonu suggest that Azikiwe's break with NYM was because he was too ambitious and he wanted to lead. Clearly Azikiwe's resignation from the NYM doomed it, just as his arrival energized it. The NYM never recovered from Azikiwe's withdrawal, however, the NCNC thrived when Azikiwe backed it. Zik's problem with NYM were basically two fold: he was fighting provincialism - he wanted to expand political activity beyond NYM's narrow vision of it, and he was against NYM's politics of gradualism and accommodation, especially with the departure of the generally more likeable Sir Bernard, who was replaced by a disaster called Arthur Richards. Basically, Azikiwe supported S.A. Akinsanya because he believed in the rights of the "outsider" to contest elections in Lagos. Basically, he supported the opening of the spaces against the establishment interests that backed Ernest Ikoli. As for the second reason, here's what James S. Coleman had to say about Azikiwe and his disagreements with the NYM: "The second reason for he NYM leaders declinationof the invitation was that their ideas about the future of Nigeria differed substantially from Azikiwe's at least at the time. actually the NYM had independently submitted its own demands for postwar reforms to the Secretary for th Colonies about the same time Azikiwe presented his. Azikiwe had spoken of the natural rights of self-government within fifteen years from 1943; but the leaders of the NYM were less emphatic: "...we are deeply conscious of the fact that self-government does not come by mere asking for or granting of it. It is the final consummation of the political, economic and cultural state of a people" (263). The NYM was built on a policy of vacillation. Azikiwe believed in positive action. It had nothing to do with Azikiwe's personal quest for power as Salimonu tries t make it.
 
There is clear evidence that Azikiwe enjoyed the support of a broad range of Nigerians - North and South; East and West, and that he spoke to the genuine aspiration of his generation of Nigerians. When Nigerians talk about the onset of tribal politics, they do not talk about the Yoruba people as a whole, just Awo and his supporters: because a substantial population of the Yoruba have always been politically sophisticated and forward-looking with regards to Nigerian politics and the political question. Azikiwe had some of his fiercest loyalists and supporters among the Yoruba, who backed him to the hilt, never mind the revisionists today. The NCNC and the AG always shared Yoruba votes equally. Places like Ibadan, Oyo, Ilesha, Ondo, Lagos, and so on, were overwhelming NCNC, and supporters of the nationalist party, and rejected the narrowness and fascist politics of Awo and the AG. It is sad that Salimonu had to distort, misrepresent and decontextualize Azikiwe, just to make an argument. And I have heard the description of Azikiwe as "slippery" and a s "trickster" - and its part of the colonial narrative which is ventriloquized ad nauseam by lackeys like Salimonu. Azikiwe gives a detailed account of how he raised capital to start his newspapers. Find it and read, but only stop misquoting and misrepresenting Zik. And while we are at it, it was the nationalist movement that was undermined by those whom t NCNC called, "lackeys of the empire" and you know who. At the end of it, accepting Awo's invitation would have been bad politics, because it would have alienated the critical base of the North, and it would have been bad politics. Zik basically subsumed his ambition for gthe interest of the new nation, because to him, power was not a zero-sum game.
Obi Nwakanma
 
 
 
 
________________________________
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Salimonu Kadiri <ogunl...@hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 8, 2016 11:18 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Naming a Dog and Buhari’s Emerging Democratic Tyranny
 
 
Obi Nwakanma can diminish the heroism of Lt. Colonel Francis Adekunle Fajuyi who preferred to die than living in shame the rest of his life. What prompted him to do what he did depended on the Yoruba saying, IKÚ YÁ JU ÊSIN, as I have explained before. The same thing happened to Mrs. Ademulegun who was eight months pregnant but stood protectively in front of her husband when Major Tim Onwuatuegwu invaded their bedroom on 15 January 1966 (see p. 80, Nigeria's Five Majors by Captain Ben Gbulie who was among the coup planners and executors in Kaduna). Even the wife of Colonel Ralph Shodeinde was fatally wounded when she courageously tried to wrap herself around her husband. In Yoruba culture, defending ones integrity and honour to the point of death is well entrenched. A Yoruba Commander in Chief would not have boasted on 26 May 1967 that no military force in Africa could subdue his troops and later deserted his soldiers to flee into exile with his wife and children. That man, Ojukwu, led a thirty month insurgency to de-Nigerianize the Igbo and nine years after he abandoned his defeated army, Ojukwu shamelessly submitted, in 1979, nomination papers to Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) on Form E.C. 4D and declared, "I am a citizen of Nigeria and therefore qualified for election to the Nigerian House of Representatives on the ticket of the Great Nigeria Peoples' Party, Led by Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim, and in Nnewi Federal Constituency. The application was rejected. He was eventually pardoned by President Shehu Shagari and on his return to Nigeria he begged to apply for military pension as Lt. Colonel, the rank he held in the Nigeria before his insurrection against Nigeria, and he was granted pension as such. The disabled Igbo soldiers he led into war were left to their fates as they resorted up till date to alms begging for survival in major streets of Igbo towns and cities. The word shame or ridicule or reproach probably has different meaning in Obi's culture than in Yoruba's which is why he cannot comprehend and appreciate Fajuyi's heroic behaviour which Obi has reduced to mere 'death wish.'
 
 
On Osu caste system in Igboland Obi Nwakanma wrote, ".... only the likes of Salimonu Kadiri would call an accomplished woman like Leith-Ross*girl* just simply to demonize and discredit her and reduce her to some kind of nonentity that suggests that a *mere white girl* cannot have equal insight with men." Obi, I am afraid to use the right word, is not telling the truth. The gender of Leith-Ross is insignificant to me and I would still have rejected her Osu thesis if he were a white boy compared with indigenous knowledge espoused by Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe. It is only a gender extremist like Obi who believes that because females wear trousers, they can stand and hold their thighs together to urinate as men do!! Why did I prefer to believe in Azikiwe than 'lady na master,' Leith-Ross? This is what Obi wrote in his previous submission before the latest, *Leith-Ross says*: "ones's first impression is that the Osu form a caste apart, in the nature of the untouchables of India; yet as far as one is yet aware, amongst the extremely democratic Ibo (sic) no classes, let alone castes exist (207)." I don't believe Azikiwe was fooling himself or anybody by seconding a motion to abolish the caste system he described as satanic and vicious in Igboland. Based on Leith-Ross romantic views about Osu, Obi Nwakanma proceeded to bleach the dark history of Osu practice in Igboland into white thus, "First, Osu is not an Igbo-wide practice. ....//... Third, the Osu was connected more to religious practices than to political power, ... The closest description (of Osu) was a religious monk - one who either chooses willingly, or is dedicated by the family, to live in the external service of a divinity. .... the Osu is no longer an issue in the Igbo world or its cultural practice." After drawing attention of Obi Nwakanma to the speech of Azikiwe in the Eastern House of Assembly on March 20, 1956, in which he was seconding a motion for the abolition of Osu caste system in Igboland, he is now saying that the Eastern Region government was forward-looking in legislating against Osu caste system. Obi is challenging me to show him any "Osu" that I know who has suffered discrimination, whose status as "Osu" has permanently confined them to economic and social margins among the Igbo. This challenge is premised on Obi's belief that there are numerous Igbo captains of industry, top scholars, mandarins of the civil service, who were once "Osu." Therefore, he claims that categorizing such people as Osu do not make sense to his generation of the Igbo because the religious and spiritual foundations that once made "Osu" necessary is long gone. Let us meet in Nigeria, I will take you to Nzam in Onitsha where Osu are confined and referred to locally as Achi-Ebo, in Nsukka area they are labelled Oruma, and in Agwu area they are referred to as Nwani or Ohualusi. The people of Umuode in Nkanu East Local Government area of Enugu State are said to be descendants of the Osu and are, till date, being treated as slaves. In Oruku Community made up of three clans, namely, Umuode, Umuchiani and Onuogowu, the people of Umuode have limited social interaction with the rest of the community because of their Osu status. If I say, the dark-skinned race in the US are still being contemptuously demeaned and called niggers by the pale-skinned dominating race it will not be intelligent for anyone to ask me to show him or her any dark-skinned man that has been discriminated against because of his colour. It will sound funny to claim that a derogatory reference to a dark-skinned person as a nigger no longer makes sense since there are dark-skinned Professors of History, Economics, Literature, Science, Medicine and Engineering in the US. While Obi is white-bleaching the dark history of Osu that is long gone, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju posted on this forum an article by one Daniel Akusobi, on 26 June 2016, titled, Igbo caste Practices and Her Original Sin. Reading through the article, a link on the subject was given:
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--
Osakue S. Omoera, CMIM
Department of Theatre and Media Arts
Faculty of Arts, Ambrose Alli University
Ekpoma, Edo State, Nigeria
Email:omo...@yahoo.com
Alternative emails:osakue...@aauekpoma.edu.org, osakue...@gmail.com
Mobile:+2348035714679, +2348059997573
The secret to having everything you want out of life is the realization that you really don't want most of the things you think you want. (Bo Bennett)
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