Editorial

Adieu, Professor Obaro Ikime

THE death last week of eminent historian, Professor Obaro Ikime, at the advanced age of 86, draws the curtains on the glittering career of one of the most accomplished African historians of the past half a century.

Ikime was a man of many parts: an outstanding academic, a man of faith who proudly wore his Anglican Christianity on his sleeves, a community builder, and teacher of several generations of Nigerian students. His death is a profound loss to the history profession specifically, and Nigerian letters more widely.

A one-time president of the Historical Society of Nigeria (HSN), Professor Ikime was a historians’ historian, interested both in history writing and historical consciousness. He was, together with E. J. Alagoa and the late Kenneth Dike, one of a triumvirate of historians who wrote penetratingly and often compellingly about the Niger Delta region. At the same time, and just like the other two historical luminaries, he was also interested in and wrote copiously on questions of historiography, the meaning of history, and the craft of the historian, an obsession that comes out most clearly in at least two of his books, History, The Historian, and the Nation (2006), and Can Anything Good Come Out of History? (2018). Professor Ikime was one of the leading lights of the famous Ibadan School of History, a generation of brilliant historians who sparred on the meaning of the colonial encounter for African history and development.

Both in mannerism and comportment, Professor Ikime was a throwback to a different era, one in which knowledge and integrity were Siamese twins. He was ethical to the core, always taking a principled stance on the moral and political dilemmas of the day, and paying a stiff price for his convictions at least once. In 1990, he was arrested on the orders of the Ibrahim Babangida military junta for insisting that the country’s membership of the Organization of Islamic States was an unnecessary provocation, and that Nigerian Christians should “organise prayers so that Nigeria would never get involved in a religious war.” His subsequent detention for 90 days in the most rigorous conditions did nothing to dampen his spirits.

Professor Ikime’s passing provides an occasion to consider the state of the historical profession in Nigeria, its disarray corresponding to the chaos that is the Nigerian academy. That no major Nigerian historian currently works within the Nigerian academy is an indictment of the system. In his tribute to Professor Ikime, Professor Adigun Agbaje, a distinguished political scientist at the University of Ibadan, lamented that “Nigeria happened to him.” No student of Nigeria can pretend not to know what the eminent political scientist was referring to. Arresting and reversing this “happening” process is the key to reviving the history profession specifically, and the Nigerian academy more broadly.

May the beautiful soul of Professor Obaro Ikime rest in peace.

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