Ogo Ofuani and the Ideal of the Academic Scholar
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
A man of utmost dignity.
A focused and principled man.
A consummate academic.
Beyond even rumors about being involved
in such despicables as sexually harassing students, described as a significant challenge in Nigerian academia.
Handsome and debonair in a spirit professional, without being dandy.
A dedicated family man, with his wife, successfully guiding his children into academic and professional accomplishment.
A philosophical interpretation of the academic culture and philosophy of Professor Ogo Ofuani from my recollections of him as my mentor as a senior colleague at the Department of English and Literature, University of Benin, Nigeria, along with a picture essay suggesting his life's progression, complemented by a brief overview of his academic career. Any corrections of the information provided would be appreciated.
A Dynamic Sphere of Integrations
Image and Tex: I Salute the Collocational Master
Scholarly Configurations
A Voice of Creative Challenge
Uplifting Others as One Uplifts Oneself
Undying Reverberations
B. A. University of Ibadan, 1972 to 1975.
''With dedication and persistence, what cannot be achieved?,'' a perspective summing up Ofuani's spirit, expressly stated by him along the lines of ''hard work may seem as if it’s about to kill the worker, but it will not. Sooner or later, the prize is won, the bridge is crossed, and an indelible record is achieved.''
''When a person says 'yes', their chi, essence, attribute, and quintessence… the uniqueness of persons, animals, and things, their inner eye and ear, their sharpest point and their most alert guide as they navigate through this world and the one beyond, enabling each person shape their personal universe, says 'yes','' a conflation of Chinua Achebe on Igbo chi theory of relationships between fate and free will in Things Fall Apart, Olabiyi Yai, from ''essence'' to ''beyond'', on the related Yoruba theory of ori, in his review of Henry John Drewal et al's Yoruba:Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, and, from ''enabling'' to universe'', my own complementary line, the entire verbal collage summing up my understanding of an aspect of Ofuani's approach to life as a process in which the map of one's existence is shaped primarily by one's efforts in dialogue with opportunities, both externally presented and self created.
The meeting was about extra-legal actions by students against a lecturer on claims of student harassment by the lecturer which the students described the university as not addressing, a meeting where I was present as Assistant Secretary, having been brought into the job by Ofuani.
HoD, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Swaziland, 2008 to 2009
Dean, Faculty of Arts,
University of Benin, 2012-2016
''Modern Business Communication in English (co-edited with my spouse and friend, Dr Lady Felicia Ngozi Ofuani) won the TetFUND Book Development Project Award in 2012, worth 5.5million naira. Book published by University of Ibadan Press in 2014 (466 pages) '' ,Ogo Ofuani,LinkedIn.
''When a person says 'yes', their chi says 'yes' but a person may say 'yes' and their chi says 'no'. The universe is a balance of opposites. Where is chi located? In the mind or in the dialogue between mind and environment?'' as Chinua Achebe's wrestlings with the tension between self and circumstance, individual and environment, the ideal and the actual, spirit and matter, being and becoming, through the lens of classical Igbo thought may be distilled from his novels Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God and his essays "Chi in Igbo Cosmology,'' and "The Igbo World and its Art.''
I know Ofuani as keenly sensitive to what may be described as the nexus of individual creativity and environmental shaping, dramatizations of the chi and ikenga principles in Igbo thought, the configuring of the self within immediate circumstance and familial and professional lineage, within genetic, exemplificatory and institutional traditions, collectivities within which the individual is shaped as they carve their own path, polishing the gifts of nature in enabling a unique radiation within the synergistic matrix.
Between Creativity and Recognition
''The highest skill is guided by discretion. It is necessary to work, but how may one work such that as one does good work, others will acknowledge 'this is good work'?,'' a conflation of Ofuani's expressions, on different subjects, evoking his response to the tension between academic creativity and institutional recognition, a tension evident in various spheres of human life, at the intersection of the individual and society.
Complementations of Self and Society
''Even in the pain of bereavement, there are certain faces the bereaved person looks out for among his sympathizers, expecting their solidarity in crisis in resonance with previous companionship in more easeful times.''
''Never be too proud to recognize those whom you may see as lesser than you professionally or socially. Goodwill is primary.''
''Try to give back to society, even in a spirit of selflessness. All value of action does not reside in anticipated personal gain. Gain may emerge in ways unanticipated, '' Ofuani's perspectives, in words identical with or close to his, on the ethics of human relations.
''The radiant beauty of the lotus blossoms above the muddy water which yet feeds that beauty. One should be able to actualize one's distinctive creativity within the organizational matrices of institutions, taking advantage of their enablements and rising above their limitations,'' Ofuani could be imagined as stating, in the context of his own struggles to actualize himself within the changing configurations of institutional orientations as he encountered them in academia, as I recall his accounts of his own efforts and his encouraging me to operate in terms of a similar ethic. His style of thought may thus be understood in terms of the balance between institutional codification and individual creativity represented by his Catholic faith at its best.
The Quest for an Ever Receding Perfection
''A Christian is someone whom God has given people to care for,'' a Catholic priest once stated. ''The academic is ideally a pastor to students and younger academics,'' Ofuani's orientation may be described, an attitude fusing Christan culture and academic discipline in the spirit of his membership of the Knights of St. Mulumba, a modern Catholic order reworking European Christian ideals of knighthood in terms of personal discipline and compassionate relationship with others.
The picture above shows him as a fourth degree member of the Order, its highest level. Thus, Ofuani's life consists of growing as an academic and growing as a Christian, a unity of disciplines.
A Dynamic Sphere of Integrations
Ofuani may be perceived as shaped by his personal and professional journeys and by his identity as an Igbo man at its best in Igbo culture's confluence of unrelenting commitment to success through persistence, self denial and delayed gratification, against the background of sensitivity to life's injustices dramatised for many by aspects of the pre and post Nigerian Civil War experience of Ndigbo, a context he mentioned to me only once but which might have formed part of his sense of creative caution, a union of faith in self, in God and in the ultimately positive potential of humanity within the intrigues through which people too often think they should justify their lives.
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I salute the collocational master
the semantic configurator
the graphological patterner
technical terms from his discipline of stylistics
metaphorically applicable to the discipline of living
the choices and conjunctions of possibilities represented by verbal collocation
the creation of meaning constructing universes of words
evoking life and cosmos as semantic patterns
through which their significance is actualized
at the intersection of matter and consciousness
the patterns of value arising from visual shapes in verbal creativity
graphological forms akin to the structures birthed by the dynamism of existence.
Take your place, brother, in the configuration of creative exemplars
on Earth and beyond Earth
Human, in the imperfection of those bound by space and time,yet reflecting infinity
A quadrant in the constellation of masters
In the flesh, beyond the flesh, windows into the universe of possibilities
we may draw upon in this journey under sun, under moon.
In that place on a branch of the Benin River
Along the main highways from Lagos to the South East
Between Sapele and Ubiaja
In a city of great culture
I met the fair skinned one, his voice never used in deceit, malice or anger
composed of mind, spirit and body
steadfast in vocation
sweet of mood.
Scholarly Configurations
''It would be great to go beyond the rat race in academia,'' Ofuani's words on a particular occasion could be summed up. ''Rather than the pressure to accumulate publications in order to meet promotion metrics, it would be great to put one's best into a particular publication, even if that is the only one a person brings out for that year,'' he summed up.
Ofuani's publication history, the efforts of a scholar to contribute to the development of knowledge, a central component in what may be seen as the university's overarching goal of human formation, consists in the study of techniques of verbal expression and their significance.
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The Secular Scholar, the Catholic Priests and the Forest
Ofuani, as Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Benin, representing the Vice-Chancellor of the
university at the Convocation of the All Saints Major Catholic Seminary, Uhiele, Ekpoma.
Forests, represented
by the forests behind the Nigerians in the picture, Ofuani, centre, and the
Catholic priests, in white, were a central framework for quests for knowledge
and interactions with spirit among the ancestors of these men, cognitive frameworks resonating in contrast
and complementarity to the cognitive and spiritual vocations the men represent,
Ofuani, as a scholar in the globally dominant Western academic tradition, which has supplanted classical African cognitive systems as the primary knowledge culture in Africa, as
well as a Catholic, and the Catholic priests, representing Christianity, part of the Abrahamic traditions, which, along with Islam, have replaced classical African spiritualities as the dominant spiritualities of Nigeria.
The forest was a source of livelihood, food, water, shelter and facilitator of knowledge and action in the development of literature, philosophy and spirituality in the ancestral traditions of these figures, as evident in the ubiquity of animals, plants and water in the verbal, visual and performative arts of these traditions and the role of these environmental phenomena in the development of ideas about the meaning of existence and their significance in the engagement of these societies with beliefs in forms of consciousness beyond material reality.
Could a stylistician, a scholar of techniques of verbal expression, such as Ofuani, have existed in that pre-colonial society? Did African civilizations have corresponding disciplines? Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, is fundamental in the description of classical African systems of aesthetic interpretation, unifying verbal, visual and performative forms as philosophically grounded texts.
Could similarities to the visual patterns, the spatial contours of texts discussed by Ofuani in his work on graphology emerge in explorations of acoustic and temporal patterns in the oral literatures that were the primary verbal forms of those societies, the oral, the performative and the written converging in such classical African expressive systems as the Nigerian South South and South East Nsibidi?
What are the implications of rupture, correspondence and continuity between classical African knowledge systems and the Western academic culture represented by an Ofuani and Western derived spiritualities, such as Christianity, represented by the priests?
The Catholic scholarly tradition has its roots in the efforts of the Church in Europe to mediate between the inspiration of non-Christian European philosophical traditions and the Christian faith. African Christian priests, such as Placide Tempels, John Mbiti and Bolaji Idowu have been central in the understanding of African cognitive and spiritual traditions and the possibilities of dialogue between these and Christianity, intercultural dialogues resonant with those evident in the electronic library of the seminary at Ekpoma.
A Voice of Creative Challenge
Whenever I see Ofuani's picture, particularly as I recall his more youthful self as I knew him, tall, slim and vitalistic, smart, serious and yet humane, I feel challenged
Am I living up to the potential Ofuani saw in me?
Who I am now, as an Independent Scholar, far from the systems of academia, might be puzzling to Ofuani, the consummate academic, thoroughly integrated within its protocols, written and unwritten, a man who could be a Vice-Chancellor in the spirit of mutual intellectual development that is a central ideal of a university, but a man who might not be able to find a place in the politicking that may be related to becoming a Vice-Chancellor, particularly in a Nigerian university, where ethnic positioning for that job is increasingly becoming prominent.
Last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
But...
[Urging] the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's efforts.
T.S. Eliot's words from ''Little Gidding,'' above, come to mind when I think of myself in relation to what I understand of Ofuani's professional legacy and his mentoring of a youth seeking direction, the youth I was.
Those lines evoke for me a transmutation of what I once thought I wanted to be, a superlative academic embodying the kinds of values Ofuani represents. The lines suggest for me a transmutation of those values to what I have always been without knowing, a person fulfilled within his own self created cognitive system, transposing the cognitive culture, the discipline of working within interacting cognitive spaces, from the university context in which Ofuani excelled as ASUU Secretary, Senior Lecturer, Head of Department and Dean of Faculty, to my own self created universe, interacting with the wider world in a way that delivers value distinctive to the ''bird at the passage'', the liminal condition of Okigbo's metaphoric bird, unfixed within the universalistic dominance of academia while distilling its epistemic creativity and rigour into my self constructed matrix of values.
In the Company of his Fellows
Ogo Ofuani, in suit, tie and glasses, centre foreground, at a meeting of the Faculty of Arts, University of Benin, to elect a new Dean at the end of Ofuani's tenure as Dean in 2016.
The image of the pensive, elegantly dressed man among his colleagues, some of whose faces I am familiar with, such as Eddy Erhagbe, immediately to the back and right of Ofuani, and likely, Odigwe Nwaokocha, directly behind Ofuani, both from the Department of History and International Relations, where I spent many delightful hours, inspires in me a poignant sense of the convergence of the familial and the professional that constitutes academia, those faces I recognise being people whose distinctive identities I have been acquainted with, reminding me of their presence, their individual vitalities, the complex of being and expression, of existence and aspiration they represent.
In spite of my journeys in academic systems significantly superior to that of the University of Benin as I knew it, and as it seems to exist today, these images remind me of my first institutional family, people memories of whom resonate with a vitality beyond the exposure I have had to magnificent learning systems in societies at least a century ahead of Nigeria, systems, where, like that of the University of Benin, I have not been able to plant myself, being too restless for the protocols of academia, a restlessness making such memories of discontinued relationships all the more poignant.
How may such a conglomeration of human potential as represented by the picture above be maximized? What orientations would need to be cultivated, what disciplines pursued, what enablements provided, to facilitate the unleashing of the full power of those constellations of energy represented by such an assemblage of highly developed professionals?
My earliest memory of encountering Ofuani in relation to my life outside being his student as an undergraduate, was when I expressed to him, possibly in 1990, my intention of becoming an academic.
He tried, with significant effort, to dissuade me. He must have referenced the unsatisfactory working conditions that have long been a struggle for Nigerian academia. The more he spoke, the more inflamed I became. The fire of a frustrated lover radiating through his efforts at discouragement further ignited the fuel already burning within me.
In my latest discussion with him, on the 13th of September, 2022, the day before writing this section of the essay, he painted a deeply disturbing picture of infrastructural decay and material resource inadequacy in the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Benin, issues the Department of English and Literature has been addressing through alumni donations, as he stated.
He also gave a tragic account of salary stagnation in his career as a professor, in which, in spite of consistent productivity, his income has remained fixed for a good number of years after he had reached the ceiling of his pay grade.
He told me of buying public address systems with his own money in order to adequately teach huge classes, an enablement he could engage in only beceause of supplements to his income from his periodic academic assignments abroad.
He described himself as having no electricity in his office, since the university no longer has a centralized electrical service system, with different academic units responsible for buying their own generators. All staff are responsible for their own Internet access, he disclosed, the university having no free Internet access in a learning environment, as a university is, where the Internet has become a prime frontier of knowledge development.
How can one find words to respond to such a narrative?
''How shall we clothe Omoye, who has walked into the market naked?'' as Akinwumni Ogundiran's invocation of a Yoruba proverb about the fall of the Old Oyo kingdom in The Yoruba:A New History, may be adapted, nakedness being an ultimate taboo in Southern Nigerian societies, suggesting social and psychological ruin, and the market being the ultimate public zone.
What will be the fate of the Nigerian public university system? How far can the recourse to alumni donations to complement what comes from the government go in turning the tide? Various suggestions for the revitalization of the Nigerian public university system are on the table.
Ofuani's family is an academic family. A conglomeration of academics in Nigeria, among those who have remained behind amidst the exodus to the West of a good number of Nigerian academics and professionals, those who have not emigrated thereby ensuring that Nigerian academia continues to exist, and, in the case of an Ofuani, to demonstrate values of pristine significance.
Ofuani's wife is about to become a professor at the University of Benin. Two of his daughters are PhDs and high ranking academics in the Faculty of Law in the same university. One of his sons works in the computer science unit in the university administration, with a Masters degree each in computing and management. Another son is a senior doctor undergoing postgraduate work in a teaching hospital. They have not escaped the lure of that particularly potent force driving humanity to make sense of existence, shaping society through the development of knowledge, and doing this through collectives of scholars congregating in this pursuit, the university, dramatizing this vision in the Nigerian context.
Uplifting Others as One Uplifts Oneself
"Who am I nurturing as Ofuani nurtured me?''
''Whose psychological and career development do I try to be sensitive to, nudging in beneficial directions, as Ofuani did with me?''
"Whom do I give my time to, even though I expect no returns from such effort?''
"How sensitive am I to the creative flame in others and try to feed it?''
"Who am I contributing to their own self cultivation, with gentle directiveness, letting them go their own way when they wish, even keeping their distance as they like, in a spirit of mutual freedom, as was my experience with Ofuani's mentorship?''
Undying Reverberations
''Two things fill the mind with ever new and ever greater admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily they are are reflected upon, the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me,'' declares German philosopher Immanuel Kant from his reflections on the question, ''what's the point of it all?,'' at the summit of a long academic career and just past midway through his life, in Critique of Practical Reason.
''Does the ultimate value of my life consist in the islands of knowledge I have explored, the seas of ignorance I have mapped?'' he could be imagined as asking himself, adapting images from his Critique of Pure Reason.
''How do I treat others?'', ''Do I relate with them as entities of fundamental value, beings whose significance consists in being centres of worth that define them uniquely in space and time, ends in themselves rather than people who I relate with in terms of what I can gain from them?" he could be imagined as asking, as suggested by the ethical principles for which he is best known, regardless of his limitations in appreciating the scope of humanity beyond his own gender, race and class, limitations that do not discredit the power of his fundamental insights.
The author of an ocean of words, of a universe of ideas that continue to shape philosophy around the world centuries after he left the Earth, concludes that what endures for the traveller, entering the world through a process inadequately known, and ultimately leaving the world to a place unknown, is how the person lives in relation to others, in terms of the degree that their actions transcend the present moment, to become examples of how to live within the general uncertainties and individual variables of human existence.
Over and above the universes of knowledge he constellated in his works, distilling those ideational universes into an ultimate essence, a unification of its coordinates, its perspectives on how to live in a cosmos both baffling and intriguing, Kant privileges the ''moral law within
me,'' that ''infinitely elevates my worth, as an intelligence,
through my personality [ revealing ] to me a life independent of animality
and even of the entire world of the senses, at least as far as may be inferred
from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination which
is not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life, but reaches into
the infinite.''
Links to other essays of mine about my teachers and senior colleagues at the University of Benin can be found at Inspiring Teachers.