29th July, 2017
By Gbenro Adesina/Ibadan
The Conference Centre, University of Ibadan, UI on Thursday 27 July, 2017 was filled to capacity. Eminent Nigerians, scholars and students gathered to again celebrate a prolific Yoruba writer, Daniel Oluwafemi Fagunwa. The occasion, put together by Fagunwa Study Group, FSG, in conjunction with Bookcraft, was a public presentation of a book titled, “Celebrating D.O. Fagunwa: Aspects of African and World Literary History”, edited by two scholars, Professors Adeleke Adeeko and Akin Adesokan. The book was reviewed by Dr. Ayo Adeduntan of the Institute of African Studies, UI. Speakers at the event lauded the sterling qualities of the late literary icon.
Among those in attendance were: Arakunrin Oluwarotimi Akeredolu, Ondo State Governor (represented by his Special Adviser, Research and Documentation, Kunle Adebayo); his immediate predecessor, Dr. Olusegun Mimiko; Professor Wole Soyinka; Professor Femi Osofisan; Professor Taoheed Adedoja; former Ambassador to Central African Republic, retired Colonel Rowland Omowa; Professor Dan Izevbaye of Bowen University; Professor Tunde Babawale of the University of Lagos; the Executive Editor, TheNEWS magazine, Kunle Ajibade; delegates from Adekunle Ajasin University, AAU, Akungba, led by its Vice Chancellor, Professor Igbekele Amos Ajibefun; former Vice Chancellor, Wesley University of Science and Technology, Professor Tola Badejo; Professor Gbemisola Adeoti; Professor Dele Layiwola; Professor Arinpe Adejumo; Dr. Wumi Raji; publisher/CEO, Bookcraft, Bankole Olayebi; Chief Joop Berkhout of Safari Books; delegates from Ile-Oluji/Oke-Igbo, led by Chairman, Ile-Oluji/Oke-Igbo Local Government, Dele Akinwoye and the regent of Oke-Igbo Kingdom, Folayemi Fasawe. A renowned poet, Odia Ofeimun; Dr. Ademola Araoye; Femi Odugbemi; Jahman Anikulapo; Toyin Akinosho; World Culture Ambassador, Agbaakin Olubadan of Ibadanland, Oloye Rasheed Olalekan Alabi; Dr Wale Okediran; Chief Falomo, a trustee of D.O. Fagunwa Foundation and Otunba Reuben Famuyibo were also there.
The event was spiced with cultural performance by members of Ondo State Cultural Troupe and reading of short excerpts from one of Fagunwa’s novels by Iwalewa Olorunyomi, of the Department of Classics, University of Ibadan.
Welcoming the participants, Ondo State Governor, Akeredeolu, said that there was a sense in which the significance of the event defined the challenge of nationhood, stressing, “It is quite so in the sense that a functionalist review of Fagunwa epistemology shows the ABC of nation building, particularly the individual responsibilities and collective mentality required of all the key institutions of a nation-state”.
Contextualising his discourse, Akeredolu asked, “Is this the challenge currently being faced by our country Nigeria? Yes. Are Nigeria’s problems obvious and bold enough for even the blind to see? Yes. Is redemption and rehabilitation possible to activate a rebirth? Are we doing enough service for history, justice, peace and fairness to guide our process of recovery? I doubt it. Lest we mistake the lessons from failed and dismembered nations for tales told from and about foreign lands in an imported context. I believe the recipe for our nation’s brew of self inflicted tragedy consisted in our character and uncanny ways. It is therefore in this context that I welcome and thank the Fagunwa Study Group for its great effort at activating a grounded discourse about the forms and contexts of our nation”.
Arakunrin Akeredolu averred that having read Fagunwa’s books and the Foreword by Wole Soyinka and two chapters from contributors to the book of essays, he concluded that Fagunwa’s books are metaphors for the catalepsy suffered by our nation and the context of its possible remediation. He further averred that through its various activities, FSG is channelling a path to society’s redemption and recovery. “The pastoral Fagunwa represents the originality, discretion and cultural conservatism of Ondo state people while the narrative artistry and metaphysical settings of his works are imageries conjured from the very heart of the physical expression of Fagunwa’s Oke Igbo in our Ondo state. Just as Idanre, that corrugated hill of nature’s mystery, which has inspired many creative evocations, so has Igbo Olodumare, a real and physically existing community settlement in Fagunwa’s town, evoked a title for one of his greatest works”, he stated.
Fagunwa’s book
The Chair of the occasion, Professor Ropo Sekoni who stood in for Chief Ade Ojo, hinged his speech on quotations from the book, from Femi Osofisan’s paper, Kehinde Olupona’s paper and from the Arts Council of England:
From Osofisan, “In an increasing number of homes, particularly among the intellectual and mercantile middle class, everything about our own culture is being deliberately suppressed nowadays, blacked out systematically from the children’s consciousness, including the ability to communicate in our mother tongues. … However, our governments in Nigeria have habitually, for reasons largely deriving from our colonial history, shown little interest in the area of cultural education. So, it has always been left to private organizations and individuals, especially in the artistic world, to keep raising the danger signals in this area, and to initiate programmes to salvage things”.
From Olupona, “His home place, which I referred to earlier, definitely deserves to be given a new face-lift, so that it will be preserved for generations yet unborn to recognize how much Fagunwa’s novels did in giving us a literature that can be called classic in every sense of the term”.
From England’s Arts Council—“We support the arts, museums, and libraries–from theatre to digital art, reading to dance, music to literature, and crafts to collections. Between 2015 and 2018, we will invest 1.1 billion pounds of public money from government and 700 million pounds from the National Lottery to help create arts and culture experiences for everyone, everywhere”.
According to Sekoni, the first two quotes from Osofisan and Olupona described the problem while the third one in the mission statement of the Arts Council of England illustrated the solution that most countries adopt to safeguard the arts and culture their talented citizens provide to enrich the humanity of their citizens through creativity in arts and culture.
Sekoni lamented that the government is not doing enough to arrest alienation of citizens from arts and culture. He said, “Let us accept that the money invested in this project is part of the home remittances from the Diaspora and be grateful that the Yoruba is lucky to have at this time a responsive Diaspora. But no country can depend eternally on home remittances to drive its cultural production. If these men and women had been born in our region during the locust years since the 1980s, it is possible that they would not have been able to speak and read Yoruba and consequently would not have known the significance of Fagunwa to the world. Government of Nigeria, particularly governments in the Yoruba region, need to get their acts together to arrest alienation of citizens from art and culture of people in the region”.
The scholar noted that there is nothing in the present system that prevents Yoruba governments from supporting the promotion of arts and culture and making sure that the students in primary schools learn Yoruba. He urged for the resurrection of the infrastructure that existed during the government of Action Group to support excellence in the arts and improve access of citizens to creative products.
He impressed it on the government of South West to invest in culture because it is the engine of development, calling the government to recoup some of the things done by Action Group Government that helped to stimulate knowledge and creativity in Yorubaland as well as calling for robust cultural administration, and qualitative education that would recognise Yoruba Language.
Among the tasks he set for the South West government are: States to set new policies about art and culture promotion; local government to play the main role in providing cultural development and to create funds for supporting cultural activities and be supported by the state; Good and conducive learning environment for the child between age five and eleven/twelve with instructions in mother tongue; public libraries; Museums; modern cultural policy to include primary and secondary education, children and youth policy, education and training, provision of support services to budding artists. According to him, the agencies for dispersal are: schools, libraries. museums, and societies/bodies.
He concluded by noting that “we may not have the resources of England, but ko to nnkan nii so nii dawun. If you don’t start, you cannot build”.
Also speaking, Tejumola Olaniyan who represented the Chair of Fagunwa Study Group, FSG, Professor Femi Taiwo, pointed out that the group is a collection of scholars and professionals with an abiding interest in the works of Fagunwa, stressing that Fagunwa and his works are the anchors of the organisation. Stating that the group aspires to offer a platform for the expansion of the study, creation and dissemination of knowledge about Yorùbá civilisation at the highest intellectual level. “Some years back, we noticed the absence of much recent original scholarship on the writings of Fagunwa, so we decided to do something about it. Our initial plan was for a special issue of a journal, but that transformed into a trail-blazing and hugely successful conference in Akure in August 2013. The book we are presenting today is the result of that conference. The FSG’s agenda to make Fagunwa the springboard for scholarly explorations in Yoruba literature, religion, philosophy, culture, and politics is just beginning. We will, in the near future, be asking you to be a part of an exciting programming in conferences, workshops, public lectures and book presentations on many aspects of Yorùbá intellectual heritage and its global reach. Let us together create a thriving, lively and stimulating tradition of Fagunwa scholarship”.
In his own speech, Professor Adeleke Adeeko narrated the genesis of the day’s programme. According to him, “The journey that culminated in today’s occasion started a while back, specifically six years ago around two simultaneous discussions among scholars who all cut their reading teeth on the novels of Fágúnwà. The first discussion began with me, “Mallam” Femi Taiwo, and Olakunle George proposing—with the concurrence of the two others in the editorial group, Tejumola Olaniyan and Nkiru Nzegwu—to issue a special edition of West Africa Review as a means of reigniting critical interest in Fagunwa’s work. We don’t forget both the music and the readings of our youth. The three of us wrote up a call for papers that stressed the comparative, global, and transcultural elements in Fagunwa. For the three of us, these features are the most enduring and striking in the texts, although, they are the least often engaged by Fagunwa scholars”.
He noted that they also sought contributions that explore the various literary, cultural, and historical currents that Fagunwa navigated and the many literary, cultural and historical streams into which his work has flown in theatre, translations, philosophy, and literature in other languages.
He said, “Very early after the West Africa Review plans took off, Taiwo and Akin Adesokan observed during a phone conversation that the year 2013 would mark the 50th anniversary of Chief Fagunwa’s death and they both concluded that a commemorative event would be in order. Thus, as the West Africa Review CFP worked its way through listservs and professional association bulletins, reflections on the dimension of such an event – whether a conference or a symposium – also continued”
He continued, “A third cluster of activities developed in the spring of 2012 when Tejumola Olaniyan, then director and fellow of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research in the Humanities, hosted a conference titled “Enchantings: Modernity, Culture, and the State in Postcolonial Africa” in Madison. During that conference, Kunle Ajibade, visiting from Nigeria to speak at the “Enchantings” meeting, noted that no signs existed yet of any plan to mark the 50th anniversary of Fagunwa’s passing and suggested that the journal plans be delayed so that it can be expanded to include works at a conference which the editorial team should mobilize to put up in Nigeria. The six individuals at that brief meeting in Madison—Ajibade, Adesokan, Ato Quayson, Adeeko Taiwo and Olaniyan—soon evolved, with the exception of Quayson, into Fagunwa Study Group, whose steering members now include, Gbemisola Adeoti, Diwura Fagunwa, Sola Olorunyomi, Moradewun Adejunmobi, Pamela Olubunmi Smith, Wumi Raji, Dele Layiwola, and Tunde Babawale”.
According to him, as soon as Ajibade returned to Nigeria after the Madison conference, he began to work on creating a local organising committee, along with Olorunyomi, Adeoti, and Diwura Fagunwa, the late author’s daughter. Akin Adesokan, from his base at Indiana University, Bloomington, and Tejumola Olaniyan, who made available facilities of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Louis Mead Endowed Professorship, the professorial chair he was then holding, ran the group’s administrative affairs, coordinating correspondence, funding and planning, mainly through online communication with the rest of the group. Among the first set of people Ajibade convinced in Nigeria was Professor Tunde Babawale, then director of the Centre for Black and African Art and Culture, CBAAC. Babawale was instrumental in securing the interests of two state governors, Drs Mimiko of Ondo State and Fayemi of Ekiti State. Babawale’s staff coordinated fundraising efforts here in Nigeria, helped secure venues, made all travel arrangements within and outside Nigeria, and supervised activities for the commemorative conference that was held in August 2013 in Akure.
Olaniyan lauded the contribution of Fagunwa’s widow in the success of the conference, which was intended to deepen the critical understanding of Fagunwa’s own self-apprehension as a man of many parts. He said, “At a point, Chief Elizabeth Fagunwa, the author’s then 83-year old widow, felt compelled to intervene and correct apocryphal details about the life of D. O. Fagunwa, especially his final moments. Up to that point, no exact account existed of how the writer met his untimely death on the banks of River Wuya in Bida, northern Nigeria. Indeed, going by the volume of newspaper references to Chief Elizabeth Fagunwa’s intervention, she was the star speaker of the conference! The Akure conference made Mrs Fagunwa a widely quoted Fagunwa scholar! And we’re very happy that she is with us here today. That, in brief, is the story of the origin of the book we are launching today”.
Before he launched the book, Professor Wole Soyinka insisted that he was and is still fascinated by the earlier mystery surrounding the death of Fagunwa because literature and works of imagination are made of such. According to him, Fagunwa’s death was just like the demise of any of his wonderful characters, adding that if he had simply vanished, no serious reader of his novels would have been surprised.
In her remarks, Fagunwa’s wife, Chief Elizabeth Fagunwa, made frantic efforts to correct the erroneous stories about Fagunwa, saying, “Fagunwa was a human being, he was not a spirit. I married a man not a spirit. Against the notion that Fagunwa’s body was not found, I want to tell you that his body was found and buried in Oke Igbo. She thanked all who attended the event.
The Ondo State government, Sir Ademola Aladekomo, Dr. Olusegun Mimiko, Hon Idowu Obasa, among others, paid generously to buy copies of the book.