Bayo Oyagbola’s Life in Law and Quest for Meaning 

After more than four decades in law, Bayo Oyagbola has published his first poetry collection, exploring life, mortality and the search for meaning. Vanessa Obioha speaks with him about his literary journey.

Some interests endure even as life takes a different course. Bayo Oyagbola is a prime example. Despite a distinguished legal career spanning more than four decades, his fascination with the creative arts has remained a constant.

From a young age, Oyagbola, the managing partner at Oyagbola Chambers, evinced a passion for the creative arts. He was naturally drawn to literature in all its forms, as well as history and the workings of the human imagination.

“What shapes it and what it brings into being,” he says in a recent conversation.

Although he was passionate about the creative arts, Oyagbola did not pursue formal studies in the field. Instead, throughout his secondary school education, he studied the sciences.

“I had always loved the physical sciences, chemistry most of all, but also mathematics and physics,” he explains. “To me, they were languages in which I had become fluent.”

Biology was, however, a different proposition. Even though it involved systems, Oyagbola did not experience the same deductive quality as with the other sciences. 

“Its terminology felt more external to the subject. I had been heading towards medicine qualification, but the study of the human body interested me less than the abstractions of the pure sciences.”

His parents, however, had other plans. They wanted him to study law, and when his father pressed him to make the switch, he offered little resistance. As Oyagbola puts it, his transition to law was a case of parental pressure meeting a soft target.

His interest in the creative arts endured even as he pursued a legal career. He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in law from University College London before founding Oyagbola Chambers in 1987. Oyagbola was also one of five members of the committee that prepared the laws of Ogun State in 2006 and served on the state’s Judicial Service Commission for three years. He has lectured internationally for the World Intellectual Property Organisation on copyright and confidential information.

Alongside his professional pursuits, he continued to write poetry, drawing inspiration from oral traditions and the events and encounters around him. Some of his poems came together in a single sitting, while others took shape in stages. This year he published his first collection, The Sky’s Forgotten Prayer: Echoes of River, Drum and Heaven. The collection explores memory, mortality, spirituality, Yoruba culture and the human search for meaning.

“The collection grew out of experiences, thoughts and emotions accumulated over many years, stretching into decades,” he says. “Whenever an event or encounter has affected me deeply, I have made a habit of writing about what it stirred in me. Those writings have not always been poems; they have often taken the form of prose, sometimes at considerable length.”

Balancing a demanding legal practice with creative writing was not always easy. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, gave him the space to gather his thoughts and bring some of his poems together into a collection. At least 60 per cent of his poems were written in that period. 

When his colleagues learnt that he wrote poetry, some were not surprised. They were already familiar with his contemplative nature and the subjects that occupied his mind. What raised eyebrows, however, was his decision to publish his work.

For Oyagbola, law and poetry are not entirely separate disciplines. Both demand precision, an appreciation of language and a careful consideration of meaning.

“Legal drafting demands precision, but poetry requires its own discipline. The poet must guard just as carefully against thought and imagery slipping beyond their intended meaning. An expression of glee, for example, should not inadvertently become clouded by gloom or foreboding.”

His engagement with literature and culture has also deepened his relationship with Yoruba. One of the more striking aspects of his literary journey is that he taught himself to read the language after leaving school, opening up a body of writing that had previously been beyond his reach.

“Although I had always enjoyed ‘ewi,’ much of the literature informing Yoruba thought and culture was not readily accessible to me. I wanted, for example, to write out and read the ‘Ifa corpus’ in the original Yoruba, where I felt I could understand it best.”

For him, preserving Yoruba cultural memory requires more than keeping its literary traditions alive in written form. He believes writers must also find ways to bring these works before wider audiences through performance and the spoken word.

“We must express our cultural meanings and understanding in the language of the present, as has been done extensively with Greek works, and with works in Persian, Urdu, Sanskrit and many other languages.

“We should chant Yoruba ewi whenever the opportunity arises, allowing it to extend and deepen the meaning of our everyday exchanges.”

Asked about the meaning of his collection’s title, Oyagbola offers an introspective explanation that reveals something of his philosophical outlook.

“The sky is us, and we are the sky. It is what we see and feel in our deepest contemplations. It holds our deepest fears and greatest hopes. It is what we wake to think about, and what often gives us rest.

“The prayer is our communion with our inner selves: with the id, more than the ego. I think of the id as that unconscious part of ourselves which we must nourish if we are to feel at peace. What we so often forget, I suggest, is how to communicate with our inner selves.”

In Cosmological Relativity, in which he explores time, consciousness and reality, Oyagbola shared that these subjects are interconnected, and an understanding of one can deepen our appreciation of another.

“I have never believed that knowledge should be compartmentalised. The more subjects we know, the more deeply we can understand each of them,” he says. “As for mortality, my thoughts on it have never been fixed. My quest has always been to understand why. Why do we exist? Who are we? What is this ‘we?’ No answer is fixed; no answer is immutable.”

Although his participation in Nigeria’s literary scene has been limited, his assessment of the landscape points to a disconnect between writers and the wider public.

“Writers tend to speak mainly to one another, when they are in conversation at all, while the wider public often seems bewildered by what is being discussed.”

He is equally concerned about what society stands to lose when literature and the arts receive little attention. For him, their value does not lie in entertainment or intellectual stimulation but in their capacity to cultivate an appreciation of beauty without the urge to possess or exploit it.

“We lose opportunities to encounter and enjoy true beauty for its own sake, free from the acquisitiveness that I believe is damaging our communities. To appreciate beauty without the impulse to possess it, or to make it serve our appetites and desires, is, in my view, an ennobling experience. Literature and the arts give us that opportunity.”