PROFESSOR OGO OFUANI AND THE RESONANCE OF MEMORY ACROSS SPACE AND TIME
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
“Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”
I write this essay in
commemoration of the fact that no week passes in which some salient point made
by Professor Ogo Ofuani, my teacher and
later, colleague, in the Department of English and Literature, University of
Benin, does not come to my mind.
I have not met Ofuani again in the eleven years since I left Nigeria, and have spoken briefly to him on the phone only twice, about four or five years apart, but his influence clearly is deep and reverberates in me as a voice of wisdom, unobtrusive, self-validating in relation to my current adventures, and yet operating in a space of freedom that leaves me free to accept or reject it, since the only penalty for rejection is the consequence following on experience, not any external arbiter or even inner judge.
I am amazed at Ofuani’s continued
influence on me because years before I left the University of Benin and
Nigeria, I understood myself to have liberated myself from whatever compulsions
or loyalties my relationship with him implied. I saw him as part of the departmental
establishment I was fleeing from to find my fortune in freer climes where my
humanity would be better appreciated. In spite of the strategic role members of
the department had played in advancing my career, I needed to grow beyond the
space they allowed.
In fact, it was not until the
tenth year of my time in England that Ofuani began to come to my mind repeatedly.
In that year, fundamental changes were
taking place in terms of my efforts to reposition myself in relation to my aspirations.
This repositioning involved much
ambition, significant creative thinking, even cunning skirting the edges of
breaking the law, pain, and recurrently, in the midst of the scraping against body and
mind, Ofuani would come to mind.
Was it the image of him perpetually
corporate in suit and tie in an environment where dress was left purely to one’s
own initiative, insisting that one needs to look smart particularly when things
are hard?
Is it his one line comment in
relation to the consequences of my choosing to go my own way in relation to disagreement
with the postgraduate board at my PhD seminar in the dept-“you are beginning to
feel sorry for yourself”, pulling me back to my authentic self, the one beyond the
need or desire to conform against the imperatives of the deepest self, as so beautifully
described by Ayi Kwei Armah in the conversation between Densu and Damfo in The Healers?
Is it his description of his strategies of personal hygiene in relation to personal responsibility for oneself that reinforced the strategies I applied with such success in my leap to a level of corporate positioning that I could not have achieved otherwise?
Is it the vivid image of his showing
me his notebook demonstrating his methods of crafting an academic article, making
vivid an understanding of one kind of successful academic article as a product of a
structured process, thereby potentially demystifying the concept of an academic
article for a new academic as I was and still am ?
Is it the indelible impression of
his veneration of scholarship and devotion to ultimate standards of excellence,
and his resonating celebration of the concentration of academic culture he described the University of Ibadan as being
during his own not unfraught PhD there?
Ofuani lives on in the flesh. May
he live long to his satisfaction.
To me, however, he has already
become an ancestor.
The concept of ancestor needs to
be expanded to embrace the inspirational
living ones.
In all respects, Ofuani’s abiding influence, its recurrence in
relation to various strategic situations in my life within a context of both
freedom and compelling power, recalls Wole Soyinka’s memorable evocation of the
voice of the ancestors “Do you see those whose touches are often felt, whose wisdoms
come suddenly to the mind when the wisest have shaken their heads and uttered ‘it
cannot be done’"?
We need to celebrate the terrestrial personage, embodied and yet raying out his influence through guidance given in love imprinted in the depths of the mind, an imprint resonating across space and time.
Also posted at
Encounters (blogger)