Tribute: For Ayo Bamgbose, Eulogy to the Orisa
For Ayo Bamgbose, Eulogy to the Orisa
By Olu Obafemi
For you,
It is not only a eulogy but praises in prose chant.
Chants in celebration of the Iroko;
For Ayo Bamgbose
It is not an elegy, not a mournful lyric
Nor refrains of melancholy.
We sing a song of praise
For a hero
Whose exploits keep us at the shores
As we dance
To the rhythm of harvest.
When Baba Bamgbose turned a nonagenarian, some four years ago, I had written a tribute in his honour in which I regretted that I did not have the fortune of schooling directly at his feet, in a walled classroom. I had said, inter alia: “It grievously defrays from my fortunes that I did not school directly and physically in Professor Emeritus Ayo Bamgbose’s classrooms even for a moment during my school life. But I must quickly add, as this will reflect in this very short tribute for the huge, (in literal and metaphorical terms,) foremost academic linguist in Nigeria, and proponent of language and linguistic scholarship on the African continent with international and global pre-eminence, that the disadvantage made me a special ‘pupil’ at his feet, outside the classroom.” Now, as it turned out, it will never happen again, that this mental colossus will live, from now on, only in our dreams. We will remember the ‘living ancestor’ as I coined the term, many years ago, for him and his late soulmate, Emeritus Professor Ayo Banjo, only in our memories, in interminable thought closets. He will be alive, of course, in our minds, in my mind, forever.
I continued to say, in that tribute, that I sought him out, after being stupefied by his awesome name and colossal reputation, met him and modestly acquired what some of my closest friends in Ibadan especially, probably took for granted and got on the platter of marble, almost in the character of our nation’s independence which many truthful but unkind critics refer to as ‘flag independence.’ Because we did not ‘struggle’ in direct bloody combat, like in the cases of Amilcar Cabral’s Guinea Bissau, Samora Machel’s Mozambican Liberation Movement, Agostinho Neto’s Angola/MPLA and so on, countries which gained liberation from the trenches, through blood and sweat. We took our independence for granted, somewhat. In a similar vein, Emeritus Professor Ayo Bamgbose’s direct students did not need the kind of search that I embarked upon to become a mentee of his. My friends in the Ibadan-Ife axis certainly valued and will continue to value him greatly, even more now that he has left us to join his ancestors, and former playmates who left before him. But they did not have to search far to encounter him as ‘virtual’ students like me had to do for many years before having physical encounters with him in our later life. There is nothing to warrant gloating, now that Baba Bamgbose is no more, over the fact that all of us can now only clutch to him, in our minds’ eyes, in reverent nostalgia, now that the huge Iroko has fallen.
Eulogy to the Orisa who cut the path that our feeble feet tread with ululation
Back to my narration of my search for the great mentor. When the privilege came, and I could shake hands with him, sit in meetings with him and ‘drink,’ directly and invaluably from his fount, especially since the last 20 years or so in the fold of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, where he is the ultimate father-figure, patriarch and, that phrase again, ‘living ancestor’, I could hold discourse with him with the carefreeness that his Ibadan acolytes could hardly do, more out of respect than fear. But come to think of it, because of his towering figure, overpowering, authoritative tone of speech and seemingly austere disposition, you need to be sure of your grounds, to engage him in any form of dialogue. But as we all came to find out and discovered, Emeritus Professor Bamgbose was a man of amazing candour, humorous, and very humane. He led me by the hand, along with his ‘twin’ brother, Professor Emeritus Ayo Banjo, nurtured me through the furnace of leadership as Public Orator, Vice President and President of the Nigerian Academy of Letters. Those were like dream years, ‘leading’ those who I had sought after all these years, just to behold their faces and walk with cautious timidity, behind their towering personalities
This elegiac tribute to Baba, the Foundation President of the Academy of Letters, pioneer Nigerian and African Professor of Linguistics, Professor Emeritus Ayo Bamgbose, will therefore be an excursion into my discovery/encounter with his pioneering works in Linguistics and Literature, and I dare say his builder’s role in the humanities, especially in the Nigerian Academy of Letters, the apex organization in the humanities, where he had served more than any other person living and dead in founding, nurturing and sustaining the organization. Baba Bamgbose was the spirit, the memory, the breathing archive, and memory source of the Academy. His versatility, energy and commitment to the Academy, and any intellectual bodies he was involved in, is wondrous. A firm believer in continuity as essence of institutional sustenance and growth, this departing giant-was inimitably vibrant, frighteningly active in meetings, mentally alert and profuse in discourses, supportive of leadership, submitting himself as a ‘follower’ to the peers of his nephews and children. He led us, perennially, the body of elders of past presidents in sustaining the tradition and on-going development of the Academy. I have also observed him giving compulsive energy to the Nigerian National Merit Award (NNMA) since 1990 when he had been an early awardee/laureate of the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM). His participatory leadership has had tremendous impact and influence on me, and I feel passionate in expressing my indebtedness and gratitude to him. This is an expression of his impactful and prescient presence in our lives while he was alive, and I will continue to recount the depth of my gratitude to Baba Bamgbose.
Before my later life encounter with this great and prominent academic and intellectual leader, I had, in my search for mentoring under him, found solace in some of his authoritative land-marking studies and I have benefitted immensely from and influenced by his work in language, linguistics and literature. For all these I owe this great man immeasurable gratitude and unrepayable debt. These works include Language and Nation Building (1985), Language and the Nation (1991) in which he ruminated over the various strategies of deploying indigenous languages for national integration, reconstruction and the national question. In specific terms, he had pondered over two possible models—the single language model and the multi-language model in which he considered the one-language model more attractive. Actualizing this model remains a mirage in our search for an authentic lingual franca in Nigeria. In one of his fundamental submissions on the importance of language to technological development, and from which I have learnt a great deal, he drew the conclusion that science and technology are cultural phenomena; they are the superstructures of culture to which language is the base. Hence, Bamgbose aptly and profoundly averred indisputably, that ‘unless there is a technology culture, the seed of transferred technology will fall on barren ground and it will not germinate’ (1994). The nation is yet to fashion a policy of science and technology with a cultural base. This is despite the grudging inclusion of Art in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) to now read: STEAM
We have come to identify our patriarch, Ayo Bamgbose, solely, with the development of language, especially Yoruba language and its structures, meta-language systems and contents, forgetting that the compass of his scholarship transcends linguistics. In his generous tribute to me on my 70+1 birthday published in a Festschrift, titled Larger Than His Frame II, (eds, Duro Oni and Sunday Ododo: 2021), our mammoth, now transited ancestor referred to ‘the common interest we have in the Yoruba novelist, Chief D.O. Fagunwa on whom I have written a book’ (p.707). This is an instructive statement on his literary scholarship upon which not much has been said or written. In my essay in the book put together by Adeleke Adeeyo and Akin Adesokan titled Celebrating D.O. Fagunwa: Aspects of African World Literary History (2017), I have referred to Professor Ayo Bamgbose as ‘the foremost scholar of Fagunwa literature’ who ‘established the profound influence of Fagunwa on the development of the novel in Yoruba.’ (234) What I did not go as far as revealing is the tangential inspiration I received from Bamgbose’s critical resources evident in his book, The Novels of D.O. Fagunwa (1974) on my translation of Fagunwa’s last novel, Adiitu Olodumare, as The Mysteries of God (2012). I discovered the very invaluable and pioneering work that Professor Emeritus Ayo Bamgbose edited in 1982 on Yoruba metalanguage, a pioneer glossary of ‘English and Yoruba Technical Terms in Language, Literature and Methodology when I was writing a slim chapter of a book on performance stages. And I found the book incredibly useful in accessing various English equivalents of the Ode stage concept.
It must be obvious by now that my indebtedness to our patriarch predates what he generously referred to as our ‘intensive interaction’. I had been with him on the Executive Committee of the Nigerian Academy of Letters’, a period which marked a significant period of my mentoring under this father-figure of the studia humanitas at its classical and contemporary best. Professor Emeritus Ayo Bamigbose represented/s exemplified/s today, as in many decades ago, the ideal cultivated, educated and refined, civilized man. For these lofty attributions and incredible accomplishments, Baba is/was manifestly a man who has/had seen it all and has been so recognized nationally, continentally and globally. It is therefore a matter of great joy that Professor Bamgbose lived a remarkable life of indomitable accomplishments. He has been and will remain for us, long after his glorious but painful demise, a beacon of hope, a moral and value yardstick for this and coming generations.
In his chequered and treasured aegis, he has won all the notable honours and colours available in the field of the Humanities. His biodata is writ large and merely reading it swells the head: Foundation President of the Academy of Letters, sole recipient of the highest national honours of merit—the Nigerian National Order of Merit NNOM; 1990); first honoree of the membership of the Linguistic Society of America; first African President of the International Association of World Englishes (2000); first African to be named 2nd Vice-President of the Permanent International Committee of Linguists(2003); In 2009 he became, by election, the Foundation President of the Assembly of Academicians of the African Academy of Languages, and on and on…!
Your life had been an awesome, un-die-able and imperishable monument and legacy: one that cruel death cannot touch, cannot take away from us. All of us, from your dear close-knit family, and we on the extended beneficiaries of your sprawling sojourn, have an abundant inheritance and heritage to nurture and to relish. Goodnight Baba Bamgbose, patriarch of the humanities. Goodbye then, till paths cross and crisscross paths, in the world beyond.
Baba: Saunter steadily
Beyond the Agemo phase
Into waiting ancestry.
- Obafemi is Emeritus Professor of English, University of Ilorin and a former president, the Nigerian Academy of Letters.
Olu Obafemi.