For Ayo Bamgbose, Eulogy to the Orisa
By Olu Obafemi
For you,
It just isn’t solely a eulogy however praises in prose chant.
Chants in celebration of the Iroko;
For Ayo Bamgbose
It just isn’t an elegy, not a mournful lyric
Nor refrains of melancholy.
We sing a track of reward
For a hero
Whose exploits preserve us at the shores
As we dance
To the rhythm of harvest.
When Baba Bamgbose turned a nonagenarian, some 4 years in the past, I had written a tribute in his honour wherein I regretted that I didn’t have the fortune of education immediately at his ft, in a walled classroom. I had stated, 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, because it turned out, it’ll by no means occur once more, that this psychological colossus will dwell, any further, solely in our desires. We will bear in mind the ‘living ancestor’ as I coined the time period, a few years in the past, for him and his late soulmate, Emeritus Professor Ayo Banjo, solely in our recollections, in interminable thought closets. He shall be alive, in fact, in our minds, in my thoughts, eternally.
I continued to say, in that tribute, that I sought him out, after being stupefied by his superior title and colossal status, met him and modestly acquired what a few of my closest pals in Ibadan particularly, most likely took with no consideration and received on the platter of marble, virtually in the character of our nation’s independence which many truthful however unkind critics refer to as ‘flag independence.’ Because we didn’t ‘struggle’ in direct bloody fight, like in the instances of Amilcar Cabral’s Guinea Bissau, Samora Machel’s Mozambican Liberation Movement, Agostinho Neto’s Angola/MPLA and so forth, international locations which gained liberation from the trenches, by blood and sweat. We took our independence with no consideration, considerably. In an analogous vein, Emeritus Professor Ayo Bamgbose’s direct college students didn’t want the type of search that I embarked upon to turn out to be a mentee of his. My pals in the Ibadan-Ife axis definitely valued and can proceed to worth him tremendously, much more now that he has left us to be a part of his ancestors, and former playmates who left earlier than him. But they didn’t have to search far to encounter him as ‘virtual’ college students like me had to do for a few years earlier than having bodily encounters with him in our later life. There is nothing to warrant gloating, now that Baba Bamgbose isn’t any extra, over the truth that each one of us can now solely clutch to him, in our minds’ eyes, in reverent nostalgia, now that the enormous Iroko has fallen.
Eulogy to the Orisa who lower the path that our feeble ft tread with ululation
Back to my narration of my seek for the nice mentor. When the privilege got here, and I may shake palms with him, sit in conferences with him and ‘drink,’ immediately and invaluably from his fount, particularly since the final 20 years or so in the fold of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, the place he’s the final father-figure, patriarch and, that phrase once more, ‘living ancestor’, I may maintain discourse with him with the carefreeness that his Ibadan acolytes may hardly do, extra out of respect than worry. But come to consider it, due to his towering determine, overpowering, authoritative tone of speech and seemingly austere disposition, you want to make certain of your grounds, to interact him in any type of dialogue. But as all of us got here to discover out and found, Emeritus Professor Bamgbose was a person of wonderful candour, humorous, and really humane. He led me by the hand, alongside together with his ‘twin’ brother, Professor Emeritus Ayo Banjo, nurtured me by the furnace of management as Public Orator, Vice President and President of the Nigerian Academy of Letters. Those have been like dream years, ‘leading’ those that I had wanted all these years, simply to behold their faces and stroll 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 subsequently be an tour into my discovery/encounter together with his pioneering works in Linguistics and Literature, and I dare say his builder’s function in the humanities, particularly in the Nigerian Academy of Letters, the apex group in the humanities, the place he had served greater than another particular person residing and lifeless in founding, nurturing and sustaining the group. Baba Bamgbose was the spirit, the reminiscence, the respiratory archive, and reminiscence supply of the Academy. His versatility, power and dedication to the Academy, and any mental our bodies he was concerned in, is wondrous. A agency believer in continuity as essence of institutional sustenance and progress, this departing giant-was inimitably vibrant, frighteningly energetic in conferences, mentally alert and profuse in discourses, supportive of management, submitting himself as a ‘follower’ to the friends of his nephews and kids. He led us, perennially, the physique of elders of previous presidents in sustaining the custom and on-going improvement of the Academy. I’ve additionally noticed him giving compulsive power 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 management has had large impression and affect on me, and I really feel passionate in expressing my indebtedness and gratitude to him. This is an expression of his impactful and prescient presence in our lives whereas he was alive, and I’ll proceed to recount the depth of my gratitude to Baba Bamgbose.
Before my later life encounter with this nice and distinguished educational and mental chief, I had, in my seek for mentoring beneath him, discovered solace in a few of his authoritative land-marking research and I’ve benefitted immensely from and influenced by his work in language, linguistics and literature. For all these I owe this nice man immeasurable gratitude and unrepayable debt. These works embrace Language and Nation Building (1985), Language and the Nation (1991) wherein he ruminated over the varied methods of deploying indigenous languages for nationwide integration, reconstruction and the nationwide query. In particular phrases, he had contemplated over two potential fashions—the single language mannequin and the multi-language mannequin wherein he thought-about the one-language mannequin extra enticing. Actualizing this mannequin stays a mirage in our seek for an genuine lingual franca in Nigeria. In certainly one of his basic submissions on the significance of language to technological improvement, and from which I’ve learnt an ideal deal, he drew the conclusion that science and expertise are cultural phenomena; they’re the superstructures of tradition 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 but to trend a coverage of science and expertise with a cultural base. This is regardless of the grudging inclusion of Art in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) to now learn: STEAM
We have come to determine our patriarch, Ayo Bamgbose, solely, with the improvement of language, particularly Yoruba language and its buildings, meta-language techniques and contents, forgetting that the compass of his scholarship transcends linguistics. In his beneficiant tribute to me on my 70+1 birthday printed 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 assertion on his literary scholarship upon which not a lot has been stated or written. In my essay in the guide put collectively by Adeleke Adeeyo and Akin Adesokan titled Celebrating D.O. Fagunwa: Aspects of African World Literary History (2017), I’ve 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 didn’t go so far as revealing is the tangential inspiration I acquired from Bamgbose’s crucial sources evident in his guide, The Novels of D.O. Fagunwa (1974) on my translation of Fagunwa’s final novel, Adiitu Olodumare, as The Mysteries of God (2012). I found 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 after I was writing a slim chapter of a guide on efficiency phases. And I discovered the guide extremely helpful in accessing varied English equivalents of the Ode stage idea.
It should be apparent 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 interval which marked a big interval of my mentoring beneath this father-figure of the studia humanitas at its classical and up to date finest. Professor Emeritus Ayo Bamigbose represented/s exemplified/s as we speak, as in lots of a long time in the past, the best cultivated, educated and refined, civilized man. For these lofty attributions and unbelievable accomplishments, Baba is/was manifestly a person who has/had seen all of it and has been so acknowledged nationally, continentally and globally. It is subsequently a matter of nice pleasure that Professor Bamgbose lived a exceptional lifetime of indomitable accomplishments. He has been and can stay for us, lengthy after his wonderful however painful demise, a beacon of hope, an ethical and worth yardstick for this and coming generations.
In his chequered and treasured aegis, he has received all the notable honours and colors out there in the discipline of the Humanities. His biodata is writ massive and merely studying it swells the head: Foundation President of the Academy of Letters, sole recipient of the highest nationwide honours of benefit—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 grew to become, 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 superior, un-die-able and imperishable monument and legacy: one which merciless dying can’t contact, can’t take away from us. All of us, out of your expensive close-knit household, and we on the prolonged beneficiaries of your sprawling sojourn, have an plentiful inheritance and heritage to nurture and to relish. Goodnight Baba Bamgbose, patriarch of the humanities. Goodbye then, until paths cross and crisscross paths, in the world past.
Baba: Saunter steadily
Beyond the Agemo section
Into ready ancestry.
- Obafemi is Emeritus Professor of English, University of Ilorin and a former president, the Nigerian Academy of Letters.
Olu Obafemi.
