Discovering Ben Obumselu: Unravelling the Enigma of an Intellectual Legacy
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Discovering Ben Obumselu
Unravelling the Enigma of an Intellectual Legacy
From ''Obumselu, Onukaba: Darkness Falls Twice''
by Okey Ndibe
Premium Times, March 15, 2017
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Abstract
This essay investigates the curious limitations to the visibility of the late Nigerian scholar Ben Obumselu within the canon of African literary criticism. Despite being hailed by peers like Abiola Irele and Wole Soyinka as a foundational intellect of the “University of Ibadan brand,” and inspiring a fervent discipleship in figures like Isidore Diala and Okey Ndibe, Obumselu remains a spectral presence in the field’s seminal anthologies and curricula.
Drawing on a personal encounter with one of Obumselu’s former students, the essay traces the contours of his prodigious, multidisciplinary scholarship and his dramatic biography—which spans the earliest days of Nigerian academia, a role as speechwriter and organizer for the Biafran secession, political imprisonment, a later career in exile and in academics and politics after return from exile.
The piece grapples with
existing explanations for his marginalization, from Soyinka’s suggestion of a
reticent nature to Ndibe’s indictment of a philistine society, before proposing
a more complex hypothesis. It argues that Obumselu’s eclipse was not due to a
single failure, but a perfect storm of personal temperament, the violent
disjunction of the Nigerian Civil War, and an intellectual canon that
consolidated precisely during his politically enforced absences from the center
of African intellectual life.
The essay is complemented by pictures from various stages of Obumselu's life.
The body of the essay is wholly composed by me but the subheadings, abstract and second part of the title are by DeepSeek AI.
A Question from a Living Room: Rediscovering a Lost Mentor
Yesterday, the 6th of June 2026, I visited a family friend, David Olu Juwape, and we talked about his years studying English and Literature at the University of Ibadan, graduating with a BA in 1967.
In all my reading of Irele, however, I had never again encountered that name. I don't recall Yemi Ogunbiyi's edited Perspectives on African Literature, perhaps the most important exploration of Nigerian literature published in the 90s, when the UI-Unife constellation of famous humanities scholars, along with other outstanding scholars, were still active, before the exodus to the West, referencing Obumselu, talk less contain an article on him, as ought to be for a scholar of such achievement in literary studies as I came to discover him to be on Googling his name as my family friend described him in almost celestial terms.
The Apprentice’s Testimony: Obumselu as the Intellectual Muse
‘Every man’, Ben Obumselu wrote, ‘is a lover and follows the Muse’. Prodigiously gifted, extraordinarily learned and informed, oracular in his pronouncements in spite of his unassuming mien, Obumselu was himself the fulfilment of every ambitious student’s deepest dream of the intellectual Muse.
He, moreover, had the patience, the compassion, and the generosity to guide the enthusiastic student on the challenging path to truth.
When I and my generation of students at Imo State University, Etiti (now Abia State University, Uturu, Nigeria) first met Obumselu in the classroom in the early 1980s, the experience was nothing short of a revelation of the enthralling delights of the life of the intellect.
Our stars could hardly have been more auspicious. Dreams were engendered; careers were born; eternal discipleships were begun.
Discovering Obumselu and his work has been one of the profoundest experiences of my life ( ''Tribute: Ben Obumselu (1930–2017): Pioneer African Literary Critic'', ALT 36: Queer Theory in Film and Fiction).
Wow. I needed to know more. The Wikipedia article on him surveys the triumphs and challenges of his multi-faceted career, as student, university scholar in Nigeria and Europe, as combatant and writer on the Biafran side in the Nigerian Civil War and his later role in Nigerian politics, an account of an unusually dynamic life reinforced and expanded by various online essays on him, some of which are linked in the Wikipedia article.
Obumselu...expressed special preference for the vocation of the university teacher. He thought particularly highly of research as a means of generating new insights and saw scholarly publication as a serious gesture aimed at the attainment of immortality.
Consequently, beginning from his first essay ‘The Background of Modern African Literature’, published in Ibadan in 1966, he consistently demonstrated the rigour which responsible scholarly publication demands.
He was remarkable for the catholicity of his interests, the thoroughness of his modes of enquiry, and the charm of his formulations.
He was also typically tireless in his zeal to trace ideas to their ultimate sources and to follow their varying mutations.
Regarding cultures as necessarily alive, dynamic and exogamous, he methodically explored the history of a great diversity of literatures, sculpture, music, languages, religions and other human endeavours to contend that the mystique of national culture is a twentieth-century error.
One of the pleasures of reading Obumselu is that every typical piece is an ambitious multidisciplinary tour de force, expressed, moreover, in graceful and powerful language ( "Tribute").
I was moved. This captures my scholarly ideal, roots of which, in the Nigerian context, are in the intersection of Wole Soyinka, Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo, the wider African configuration bringing St. Augustine of Hippo into the picture, of whom its written that ''he was eclectic as regards his sources but he was unique in the crucible treatment with which he amalgamated them into new schemata of astonishing freshness and power'', a line I am writing from memory though last read in a Catholic encyclopedia more than twenty years ago, so powerful is the formative force of great writing and the soaring spirit of cognitive quest for me.
A Generation Transformed: Ndibe and the Ethical Apprenticeship
Reading Okey Ndibe, Chuddy Oduenyi and others, on Obumselu, it is clear that Obumselu had a similar and even more profound effect on many people.Ndibe recounts encountering Obumselu well after Obumselu's earlier journeys as teacher in universities in Africa and Europe, suggesting the geographical reach of Obumselu's career, impacting Ndibe in the early post-civil war Eastern Nigeria:
I first became aware of Obumselu’s uncommon brilliance in the early 1980s when Adinuba and I followed his occasional appearances on TV to discuss political developments. Even though he was then aligned with the Nigerian Peoples Party (NPP), Obumselu’s pronouncements were shorn of partisan rancour and sectional cant. Urbane in speech, patrician in bearing, but absolutely approachable, Obumselu approached politics with a deeply philosophical cast of mind: he let the facts lead, refraining from the temptation to twist his analysis to conform to a given political agenda.
Once we met him in person, it was easy to see why. He was not just a man of stupendous learning, he had, in addition, leavened his staggeringly impressive intellect with moral sagacity. We were fortunate to know him at a time that, looking back, constituted our most intense and defining intellectual and ethical apprenticeship. It was a time when Enugu brimmed with a certain kind of political and intellectual capital, affording us the opportunity to spend time with such noble personages as Mokwugo Okoye, Akanu Ibiam, Samuel Gomsu (SG) Ikoku, and Obumselu. The benefits one derived from those encounters, and from the palpable intellectual ferment, have endured (''Obumselu, Onukaba: Darkness Falls Twice'', Premium Times, March 15, 2017).
Diagnosing the Silence: Reticence vs. Societal Indifference
In his tribute to Obumselu at his passing on 4 March 2017, Professor Wole Soyinka appraised him in veneration as ‘a solid academic, one of the pioneers of the distinctive University of Ibadan brand, and one whose personality helped to shape Nigeria’s collegial culture before its later debasement’. Soyinka regretted that Obumselu had been ‘for far too long a yawning gap in any compendium of African literary criticism, since Obumselu was such a reticent expositor of his own productivity’ (''Tribute").
There are two ways in which the trajectory of Obumselu’s life served as indictment of the particular society in which he was born. There’s the fact that his life as an academic in Nigeria was rather short-lived. Had he lived in a society with a healthier recognition of the role of intellectual power, Obumselu might have been encouraged—with research grants and other endowments befitting a first class scholar—to spend more years in academia, inspiring generations of students and modeling excellence for his colleagues.
Two, I believe that a man like Obumselu, whose grounding in the humanities was intimidatingly vast, would have written several seminal texts if he had been fortunate to live in a society that prized intellectual matters. Instead, he spent many years in a country where a man who treasures the life of the mind must contend with incessant power failures, the anti-intellectual policies of philistines in power, and a pervasive antipathy to intellectual production, a cynicism compressed into the dismissive phrase, “Na book we go chop?”( " Darkness Falls Twice").
A Hypothesis of Historical Disjunction: The Canon’s Blind Spot
Can it be argued that when the canon of early Nigerian and perhaps even African intellectual history was being consolidated, he was not in Nigeria or Africa, a time when the centre of African intellectual activity was in Africa, before the splintering represented by the exodus to the West in the late 90s perhaps?
But did this canon formation period not run from the 70s, to the 90s, with Obumselu being encountered by Diala at Imo State University in the 80s?
The Nigerian military establishment also chose not to make anything further of those sympathies on Soyinka's part, Soyinka having already suffered the punishment of prolonged imprisonment during the civil war, while Obumselu may have been wise to go into exile for fear of reprisal from the victorious Nigerian government, a situation made more challenging by his being Igbo, the ethnicity at the heart of Biafra, while Soyinka is Yoruba, a prominent son of a section of the ethnic coalition that defeated Biafra.
Another such scholar/writer/political activist was Christopher Okigbo, a Igbo writer who did not even survive the war, having died while fighting in the Biafran army. Such a prominent Biafran commander as Joseph ''Hannibal'' Achuzia was also imprisoned for a time after the war but later regained his freedom. The situation, at the time, however, may have been too fluid for Obumselu to feel safe, hence he fled into exile.
''…the Obumselu literary quintessence [ is] fully captured by the fifteen chapters of this compendium and constituted of the following:
1. An amazing knowledge of the literatures of other parts of the world as they relate to Africa
2. An in-depth appreciation of the inner mechanics of the expression ‘poetry’ as being more of a pattern of linguistic expressions that point to, but not necessarily implying, a message.
3. A preference for reading literary texts in their original.
4. A critical scholar’s knowledge of other arts – music, painting, sculpture, fine art, photography/cinematography – all appreciated in their proper registers and collocations.
5. An inquisitive knowledge of the geography on which a literary material is based.
6. An approval of the imaginative foray into the world of the fantastic in order to sift out symbolic/metaphoric materials for the exploration and re-interpretation of the realities of modern life.
7. Finally, a literary catholicity suggesting not only the interlinking of cultures but also the audacious allowance which the artist exercises in foraging into the cultural world of people, no matter how weird, earthly or complex, in search of materials for artistic portraiture.
The rigorous commitment which Professor Isidore Diala imposed on himself in order to present this Obumselu literary quintessence in a compendium has paid off, and serious scholars of African Literature can now heave a sigh of relief that the Obumselu imprint on African Literature has finally been domiciled.''
Afam Ebeogu, review of Isidore Diala (ed). Obumselu on African Literature: The Intellectual Muse. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, 326 pp. ISBN 978152752305-0, hardback.
“Wherever Obumselu’s name was evoked, it was always with uncustomary reverence… The reverence was for his solid scholarship and perspicacious mind; his assured, limpid prose which lent to his pronouncements a kind of magisterial poise; his cool and classical power of exegesis. This compendium of Obumselu’s work is an invaluable contribution to the criticism of African literature.”
-Femi Osofisan
“This compendium is a welcome tribute to Ben Obumselu, one of the most widely read, liberally educated, and profoundly cerebral scholars Nigeria has ever produced... In it, we encounter the genial, affable, humorous, and disarmingly accessible gentleman―a scholar who knew how to captivate without being intimidating.”
-Niyi Osundare
“Ben Obumselu did not write much―most of his critical productions are available here. This was perhaps an innate habit of perfection, a proneness to treat knowledge as something that would endure, deserving to be honed like a work of art.”
-Dan Izevbaye
From Amazon.