Adieu, Biodun Jeyifo

ON the morning of February 11, Professor Biodun Jeyifo transitioned into immortality. Within hours, tributes poured in from former students across Nigeria, from colleagues at Cornell University, from Harvard University, and from scholars in China. Professor Jeyifo, popularly known as BJ, was the most rigorous Marxist critic of his generation and a connoisseur of Yoruba masquerade traditions. He produced the most sophisticated body of work on Wole Soyinka, yet spent years organising lecturers through the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), driving his battered Volkswagen across campuses to argue that collective action was not the enemy of intellectual freedom but its condition. He embodied the rare fusion of theory and practice: a scholar who believed ideas must earn their relevance in the real world.

Jeyifo’s classroom at the University of Ife, today Obafemi Awolowo University, was legendary. He taught as if ideas were being forged in real time, drawing from Marx and Fanon, and from Yoruba oral poetry and the travelling theatre troupes of Ibadan’s motor parks. Students arrived expecting ideological catechism and found instead intellectual liberation. He insisted that African literature could only be understood in conversation with the world, and that criticism was not about repeating orthodoxies but about learning how to ask better questions. He was patient with confusion, merciless with laziness, and allergic to easy praise.

His academic legacy is immense. His pioneering study of Yoruba popular travelling theatre transformed performance studies by treating so-called “folk” traditions as complex cultural systems. He showed that these performances were not mere entertainment but living archives of social memory, spaces where class, power and identity were negotiated in public view. His critical engagements with Chinua Achebe and Soyinka redefined how canonical African texts are read: never reverential, always interrogative. He admired craft but questioned politics, celebrated achievement but challenged assumptions. For Jeyifo, criticism meant refusing both nationalist piety and left-wing dogma. As editor of Modern African Drama, he shaped how generations of students would encounter African theatre. But he also believed that criticism should not remain locked within universities. Through his columns in The Guardian and later The Nation, he brought literary and political analysis into public life, demonstrating that close reading was not an academic indulgence but a civic skill. In a country where power often speaks in slogans, he insisted on complexity. He showed how the manipulation of language was always the precursor to the manipulation of people.

His activism was no footnote. As one of the founding figures of ASUU, Jeyifo helped build one of Nigeria’s most resilient intellectual institutions. He travelled tirelessly, forging solidarity across ethnic and regional divides, drafting communiqués by candlelight, and defending academic freedom under both military and civilian regimes. He understood that universities could not serve society if they were subordinated to arbitrary power, and he paid the personal price for that conviction. Yet his Marxism was never doctrinal; it was a method for understanding Nigerian realities, refined through lived struggle rather than borrowed slogans.

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In later years, Jeyifo became a bridge between continents. At Cornell, he placed Achebe’s Things Fall Apart at the centre of freshman orientation, insisting that African literature belonged in the core of American education. When Achebe visited, Jeyifo gathered Nigerian faculty for an intimate meeting with the author, quietly reminding them that global recognition should not eclipse local community. At Peking University, he helped establish one of Asia’s most ambitious African studies programmes, opening new intellectual frontiers between Africa and China. He anticipated a future in which African scholarship would be shaped not only in Western capitals but across the Global South.

Jeyifo’s intellectual stature was global. It was said of him that “No other scholar, apart from Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, is more attentive to the radically dispersed accents or strands of thinking the post-colonial the way BJ has done.” In that rarefied company, he stood not as an imitator but as an originator — a thinker who insisted that postcolonial critique must be historically grounded, materially attentive, and ethically alive to struggle. Jeyifo was, without question, the world’s preeminent authority on Wole Soyinka. His magisterial study, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), remains the most comprehensive and sophisticated single-author study in African postcolonial scholarship. Where others dismissed Soyinka’s complexities as obscurantist, Jeyifo discerned the deliberate deployment of modernist and avant-gardist techniques. He revealed that the “difficulty” was not indulgence but insurgency — a formal rebellion adequate to the crises of the postcolonial state. His readings combined intellectual rigour with what admirers rightly called “sheer writing pleasure,” making criticism itself an art.

Yet for all his stature, what remains most vivid is the man, not the monument. He was warm, argumentative, stubborn, and deeply loyal. He asked unsettling questions late into the night, worried aloud about the future of Nigerian universities, spoke tenderly of his children, and remained attentive to the small details of friendship—phone calls, hospital visits, shared meals. He welcomed disagreement and never feared conflict, provided it was honest. He believed that intellectual life was sustained not by consensus but by principled argument.

Jeyifo was born on January 5,1946, in Ibadan, and his formation coincided with that city’s moment as the cultural and intellectual capital of a decolonising nation. All his formal education — primary, secondary, tertiary — took place in Ibadan, and the cosmopolitan ferment of that era never left him. He graduated with first-class honours from the University of Ìbàdàn in 1970, only the third to do so after Dan Izevbaye and Molara Ogundipe. From there, he proceeded to New York University, earning his master’s and PhD under the supervision of Richard Schechner. The foundations laid in Nigeria would blossom across continents. Jeyifo died at 80 in Ibadan, where he was born. His passing closes a chapter in African letters, the era of scholars who believed literature was not merely an art but a tool for understanding and transforming society. He leaves behind books that will endure, institutions he helped strengthen, and generations of students who learnt from him not just what to think, but why thinking matters.

In a time marked by cynicism and fragmentation, his life stands as a reminder that rigour need not cancel compassion, that politics need not destroy imagination, and that criticism can still be an act of ethical commitment. His voice is silent, but his words remain. And for those who walked part of the road with him, there is gratitude beyond grief: gratitude for a life spent in thought and for the intellectual paths he cleared for others to follow.