By Oyeyinka Fabowale
Teaching is unarguably the oldest, most significant and utterly pervasive in character and impact of all vocations in the world. Since creation, teachers have played a unique role in advancing man’s quest to discover, understand and make beneficial use of fragments of the primordial wisdom and knowledge by which the infinitely vast and wondrous world in which they sojourn is composed and on which it runs.
From higher spirit-guides, substantiate beings that taught our earliest ancestors how to cope with the existentialist problems and dominate their physical environment; the old prophets, who brought knowledge about the Laws of God and how living in accordance with these laws that embody and express the Will of the Creator promotes peace and harmony and progress; parents, responsible for inducting the child into the ways of life and the society; to formal and informal teachers – employers, bosses, supervisors and others who impart knowledge to which we owe the phenomenal development in diverse aspects of life -science, technology, arts/culture, politics, governance, business/economy, international relations and so on.
It can thus safely be said that the world rests on the shoulders of teachers like Atlas, as it is their charge to help mankind cultivate and enrich their mind, abilities, talents and skills towards creating a happier and fulfilling life for themselves. This is the sole goal to which the two major branches of knowledge – science and humanities are preoccupied with.
Any wonder that the teacher is listed among the only three personalities, that Muslims are obligated to accord respect, after the Almighty Creator. They are – The Messenger of God, a man’s parents and his boss/instructor who trained him in the vocation or trade by which he makes his living.
A time there was when the teacher was metaphorically a god or ‘alternate king’ in communities with monarchs. Though he may have no farm or barn of his own, parents of his pupils and virtually everyone in the village ensured he never lacked in regular supplies of yams, cassava, maize, vegetables and other farm produce. Even hunters returned from their expeditions to present him with the best of their kills or bush meat caught in traps set around the farm fences. He was consulted for advice by the king on political and development issues affecting the community. The erstwhile long-running popular TV soap, Old Village Headmaster on Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) illustrates this fact well.
But who wants to be a teacher now? What with the poor working conditions, unattractive wage and public stigma and derision!
Not in this jet age of race for big bucks, yahoo-yahoo and what-not. Gen Z especially will reject the suggestion of a curse! So, will even a primary school pupil if given as a debate topic to advocate or defend!
Teachers in this age are the most scorned, least appreciated and least rewarded of workers in this clime. As the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) aptly puts it, their take home wage is so poor it cannot take them home,
Little surprise that students with average or the least academic pass grades are the ones admitted into educational faculties in our universities and colleges of education. The ironic implication for the worsening decline in educational standards has apparently not yet occurred to the authorities.
But I digress.
I actually only wanted to write about Professor Olu Obafemi, Nigeria’s foremost literary icon and one of its proud contributions to global literati and scholarship. A man whose ambition to become a journalist and school mates’ forecast that he would end up a top-class bureaucrat owing to the exceptional brilliance and leadership qualities he displayed early in life, fate seized and turned into a teacher.
Earlier this week, the University of Ilorin announced his appointment as Emeritus Professor, the highest attainable academic height in the university. The honour, which comes with special privileges, signifies his crowning as a teacher’s teacher and caps four decades of distinguished and impactful career in teaching and research in the university where he began his academic career in 1976 and retired in. Given his stellar trajectory and invaluable contributions, Prof Obafemi and indeed the world must be happy that he did not fight but readily acquiesced to follow the path destiny marked out for him.
I had known Obafemi by reputation as an astute academic, author and dramatist and was quite familiar with his writings as a newspaper columnist too – grave, polemical, witty and full of gadfly temperaments.
But my first encounter with him was at a symposium at which he presided as chairman at the university of Ibadan decades ago. The talk shop was part of a series of programmes in honour of the memory of the late playwright, Zulu Sofola and her husband, a social scientist, Prof… Sofola, and had in audience frontline culture activists and members of the intellectual class. Among them, Emeritus Professor Femi Osofisan, Dr. Malomo, Prof. Mathew Umukoro and Foluke Ogunseye (Nee Adesina), a veteran Nollywood actress and Convener of Ife International Film Festival, among others.
A dozen eager hands went up among the audience to his call for contribution to the panel discussion. Prof Obafemi signalled one of the owners, a young man, to take the floor. But the chap, a postgraduate student in a social science discipline, flopped the opportunity. In apparent bid to show off his knowledge ended up mystifying and boring the audience as he rambled on about post modernism and other opaque theoretical concepts and jargons.
The chairman kept an impassive mien until the young man finished, even as he watched the crowd across the gallery grow restless and impatient from the stage of the Arts Theatre (now Wole Soyinka Theatre), venue of the event. Then with a smirk on his face, he dismissed the pedant with a cutting remark: “Thank you for unleashing that whole lot of incomprehensibilities on us!”
In relief, the audience roared with laughter, as the speaker left the stage, shaken and embarrassed.
I was both bemused and awed by Prof Obafemi’s stern reaction which he rubbed in with a brief theatrical gesture. But the student definitely had it coming. How he imagined such a distinguished assembly of eggheads was the forum to seek to impress with his vain knowledge beats one hollow. He worsened his case by choosing to express himself simply and clearly as previous speakers had done.
Still, I felt sorry for him and for the professor’s students who, I imagined, must frequently face scalding criticisms from this seemingly unsparing tutor.
However, closer personal interactions with the old teacher years down the line revealed I was grossly mistaken in my initial presumption of Obafemi. I found him incredibly avuncular, intellectually nourishing and inspiring. He is as charitable as he could sometimes be caustic. In time, you understand that, like others of his generation, he could not live down his aversion to or countenance mediocrity and sloppiness, having been nurtured on values of excellence.
His reaction to a light-hearted comic piece I wrote about how he and elders unwound on the sideline of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Convention we had both attended in 2022 illustrates this. The former ANA National President had given a favourable opinion of the article. He loved what he called “my wit and power of observation”, he said, wondering if I managed to eat any food with all the time and attention I devoted to recording my observations.
However, the old writer punctuated my joy at this endorsement with a mild rebuke, querying if the superficial dinner table banters were all I found worthy of reporting of all the proceedings at the four-day meet?
But when reminded that an interview we both had on the insecurity situation in the country at the time and how that had affected attendance at the writers’ confab among other subject, had previously been published, the reproach on his face immediately and almost imperceptibly morphed into the genial smile that seems a permanent feature of his cherubic face,
I am probably yet to see a superior who eagerly, freely and generously sees the qualities and worth in the younger ones and their efforts. Whenever he read any of my offerings, Prof Obafemi was sure to send me his opinion, almost always laudatory and encouraging. I found the verdicts from a writer of his repute rather humbling and flattering.
I later discovered that it was in fact in his nature and calling to support people and help build promising writers.
Dr. Tunde Olusunle, his former student and protégé in the “business of intellection and creative production”, attests to have been sustainably associated and gainfully mentored by Prof Obafemi in the past four decades.
Besides helping to hone his writing and performative skills as an artist, Obafemi, along with some of his expatriate colleagues, was, according to him, one of those who broke the boundaries of teacher-student relationships during his time in the university. “He willingly and generously invited us to share drinks and accompaniments with him in the venerated spaces like the Senior Staff Club of the institution,” says Olusunle.
Abiodun Adeniyi, a former colleague in my reporting days at The Guardian, now a Professor of Communication and Dean, Postgraduate School, Baze University, Abuja, expressed similar sentiments about Prof Obafemi. He told me how the senior academic drew him to serve as his alternate secretary on the convocation committee of the Kogi State University on which they both served and had subsequently invited him to work on a series of collaborative projects.
When I mentioned Adeniyi to him, Prof Obafemi was all excitement.
“You know Prof Adeniyi?,” he asked me.
Of course, I do. I told him we both worked at Rutam House in the 1990s.
The icon extolled the younger academic’s brilliance, resourcefulness and industry. His words: “I met him, saw that he was brilliant, and after one or two meetings, I just made him the alternate secretary because he comes out as very brilliant, concise, and smart. Anything I’m doing, even if I’m giving a talk, I would say what’s your contribution to this? And he would come out with great contributions. If I had the chance, I would have made him the Vice Chancellor but he is from the same constituency with me and the university is also placed in our constituency, so the position of the VC had to go to another constituency to ensure geopolitical balancing. That’s the Governor’s position and I agreed with him. But inside me and many of the people, he was the choice.”
So does Prof Obafemi readily acknowledge or even defer to the talent and output of some of his peers. Concurring with a statement by a literary soul mate, Prof Niyi Osundare, on which I had sought his reaction, the eminent writer replied that the matter could not have been better put than had been done by “the best amongst us.”
In the same way, he brightens like a teen at the sight or mention of his namesake and bosom friend, Emeritus Professor Femi Osofisan.
Hearing Obafemi talk about his contemporaries and even younger talents with such exuberance, modesty and deference one may be tempted to think he was, perhaps, of less or mean intellectual fecundity, pedigree and accomplishments. But it is just the man in his unassuming and self-effacing nature.
Born into a humble albeit noble agrarian family in Akutupa-Kiriland in Kabba/Binu Province of Kogi State, his life has always been marked by distinction. After secondary school he was awarded a scholarship to study for his Higher School Certificate/General School Certificate at Titcombe College, Egbe and graduated as the best student. He read English at the Ahmadu Bello University, (ABU), Zaria and joined Unilorin as a foundational academic staff in 1976. He proceeded to England where he bagged an MA in English at the University of Sheffield, and a PhD (1981) also in English at the University of Leeds.
He had a distinguished career as a lecturer, rising to become Professor (1990) among other appointments and services to the university; while also developing theatre practice and studies on the campus as a playwright, director and staging drama productions.
Prof Obafemi has fulfilled his calling as a teacher not only in the classrooms, seminars or academic conferences but also on stage and through his prolific writings in academic journals, newspapers, magazines and his books. His works which cut across the literary genres, articulate and highlight social political concerns, issues of social justice, equity and glaring dysfunctional governance.
He himself puts his cross-generic enterprise and role as a teacher-artist in this context: “I think they are inter-sectional, as it were. Being a teaching, literary scholar, and dramatist …you have two options – go to the classroom or drama (the stage). But as a teacher, the scholarship is the more tenured, more intended, more engraved into the soul.”
Prof Obafemi has had a long list of national and international recognitions and appointments. He was National Chairman of REPRONIG; Chairman, Board of Directors , National Commission for Museums and Monuments; National President ANA; National President, Nigerian Academy of Letters; Fellow and Trustee of the Society of the Nigerian Theatre Artists (SONTA); Director of Research, National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, NIPSS), Jos; as well as Pro Chancellor and Chairman, Governing Council to the Federal University of Technology, Minna and…
He is a holder of the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award, the highest national honour conferred on Nigerian academics who have made exceptional contributions to scholarship.
Back home in Kogi, his community installed him with the honorary chieftaincy of Asiwaju (Leader) of Kiriland in recognition of his innumerable sacrifices and services to the development of the area. Trust Obafemi, he has transformed the chieftaincy from a mere titular into an active office with definite responsibilities in deeds and actions.
Now the recognition seems to have gone the whole cycle with his dubbing as Emeritus Professor. The proclamation which was long in coming seems to confirm the prophetic sensing of an old man in his village while growing up that he would be great and reach the peak of his career. Prof. Obafemi recalls in an interview: “I don’t know what he saw but I was very traumatized by the old man. He would call me Ogungogoro, the tallest man, whereas I was the shortest boy. It was my mother who put my mind at peace. She said the man nursed no ill will against me but must have seen something which made him to call me so, but which I, as a child may not yet know about.”
With the discharge of this prediction, it is probably not out of place to look in the direction of Norway for the next and ultimate diadem to come and decorate Obafemi’s temple and declare his rulership of the world of letters. After all, not for nothing is he called, Olu which means ‘Ruler’ and ‘Obafemi’, ‘Beloved of the King!’
To the latest toast of Africa’s literary firmament, “Okun, Ba mi! Oye a mori tipe tipe o!”