Garlands to Professor Akinwumi Isola (Honest Man)

I had gone, in the company of my friend, Prof Femi Osofisan, some two months or so ago, to visit ‘Honest Man’. I had not seen him for quite a while since he fell ill. What I found was quite disheartening. Prof Akinwumi Isola, as anyone close to him must know, is a vivacious, warm and highly infectious humourist and an encyclopaedia of anecdotes and stories. To find him in a state of near-immobility, taciturn and hardly able to recognize close friends welled up a pond of un-shed tears inside me. The wife, a sheer bundle of devotion and care, updated us about his condition; his eagerness to speak and walk and his undying appetite, especially when it comes to fresh and cooked maize. Honest man spent some time  trying to recognize me ( he didn’t spend that much time fixing Femi, who was a constant visitor to his house during this period of ill-health.) He suddenly broke into a broad smile and I took his hand and said a few encouraging words to him.

On our way back to UI, there was a prolonged space of silence an unspoken thought between Femi and I. After a while, I broke the silence to ask what was to be done about the numerous stories that Honest Man must be carrying in his brain and chest and we came to the conclusion that there was an urgent need to hire some assistance that will record some of these stories. Honest man has carried to the world beyond tons of these unrelieved and un-debriefed stories and the world remains gravely deprived of the knowledge, morals and ethos that must have embedded this avalanche of stories which our friend, the story-teller, raconteur artist, creative writer, dramatist and great scholar will no longer sheer with us anymore. I remember the moments I shared with him in the past in the company of Femi Osofisan and, oftentimes in the company of his enduring mentee and notable Yoruba linguist, Professor Duro Adeleke, on evening relaxations inside Iwo road and the numerous fresh, unrepeated stories that tumbled from the practiced tongues of Honest Man, the master story-teller.

I met Honest Man’s scholarship and creativity before making a physical contact with him. During my research into the Yoruba folklore and drama, I had read his essay delivered at the 1977 Second Annual African Literature Conference Ibadan titled Etiyeri, One Type of Social Saire Songs in Yoruba. This is a social commentary and entertainment song tradition which maintains a close link with the Egungun cult. It is characterized by Efe (fun and humour) and we can begin to trace sources of Isola’shis trademark sense of humour. This was before I read and watched his numerous fictive/drama creations including Efunsetan Aniwura, Oleku, Saworoide, and so on. Not an active participated, I was witness to some of his collaborative work with Femi Osofisan on the Fagunwa classics, which Femi was producing for Charms and whose Yoruba adaptation were done by Akinwumi Isola. His commitment to scholarship and compulsive devotion to the creative and cultural industry were unsurpassed.

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There is no iota of doubt that the death of Honest Man, Akinwumi Isola is a colossal loss to the whole Yoruba socio-cultural communities and the academic/literary world. He has created a niche for himself in the academia with his great intellectual acuity in addition to his multilayered involvement in promoting Yoruba culture through his numerous literary and theatrical works. Akinwumi Isola was a creative icon and a Yoruba-cultural connoisseur whose works reflect, essentially, his bid to correct social deviants and ethical aberrations in African societies. He was a versatile teacher, scholar, translator director/practitioner/actor and repository of Yoruba cultural and literary studies as well as a promoter of excellence in the teaching and the deployment of African languages for the promotion of global knowledge..

Ishola was a voracious reader with an incredible memory which combined to make him a vast and enviable storehouse of knowledge. He was acknowledged for his great humility in spite of his daunting intellectual exploits and achievements. Isola’s use of language is unique and profound. He had great competence and performance in both English language and his mother tongue, the Yoruba language, which he fondly functioned in professionally and socially except when it was inexpedient to do so. With a background in French from which he took a few cultural attributes—he Yorubanized as much as he could the way the French Frenchify. Hence, he assiduously promote the use of the local language among its users in a world in which it was found more convenient to promote the foreign languages

His works evince striking experimentation and bold exploration of diverse themes for social transformation and mass illumination. He used his works to reflect and correct the ills of the decadent societies, especially his immediate environment, Nigeria. For instance, in Saworoide and Agogo Eewo he comments on the problems of dysfunctional governance/ leadership and corruption that rabidly impede democratic growth sustainable development in African countries.

Isola’s aesthetics—in theory and language– have been massively explored by numerous artists and scholars in search of artifice, ideological direction and enduring cannon for African cultural production and entry into globalization. Literature, especially drama, is no doubt the most social art form deployed to reflect and refract the society through various characters and Akinwumi Isola, as a well known Yoruba playwright and a novelist, though, he has written extensively in all genres of literature, who has etched a niche for himself through the combination and synthesis of individual talent and sensibility, and his ability to subliminally absorb cultural traditions. He is a versifier in terms of his craftsmanship in the oracular Yoruba constructs as we find most manifest in Efunsetan Aniwura where his  highly technical,  differentiated techniques and his stylistic armoury provide sheer delight in language, phonetics and ideasational resources which aid the perception of the emotive and cognitive values of his literary creations..

It is also pertinent to affirm that Ishola has been able to explore in his creative works, an extraordinary, wide range of forms, styles, proverbs, metaphors, imageries, and idioms in inimitable ways. In a novel like Saworo’ide (which my Ajon Players recently produced here in Ilorin) and also in Agogo Eewo, Akinwumi Isola extensively explores the power of language, of metaphor, symbols, textual figurative explication, myths and archetypes and other figures of speech to mediate and interrogate  major preoccupying  themes of his works, ranging from social  justice and equity, class struggle and freedom, gender equality, struggle for self-representation, good governance, fight against corruption, avarice in governance, and so on. As a writer, he never abandoned his consuming need to expose and denounce the reactionary, self-serving terror, and violence which dim-witted leadership entrenches in society. We found that Proverbs as an  essential device in Yoruba culture of communication, are extensively utilized for aesthetic and ideological concerns in Ishola’s works. They are explicated in his texts as a tool for criticism, plot generation, and as an instrument for cultural propagation, awareness and preservation in addition to their political and ideological imports and configuration.

In addition, just like his predecessors and astute Yoruba literary scholars and writers such as  D.O. Fagunwa and, Adebayo Faleti have engaged naming or use of appellations as an artistic tool in their literary works, there are varieties or categories of names in most of Akinwumi Isola) works including. Apeje, Isami, etc. Ishola exploits this variety in the category of names in Yoruba culture to enrich most of his works and as a tool for character development, especially in his novel, Saworoide, which has a film adaptation directed and produced by Tunde Kelani. Ishola demonstrated an understanding of the culture of many names for a newborn and culture of clipping that is unique to the Yoruba.

Though he has been well-honoured professionally and nationally for his merit and outstanding intellection, innovative creativity and distinct scholarship with the Felloswhip of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and the National Order of Merit Award, he never received the well-deserved national honour—and he probably did not need it, given the absence of respectable yardstick of its disbursement outside of political considerations.

Honest Man’s demise, like those of all great men and creators, is a major deprivation to Nigeria-African cultural and creative industry and our evolving museums without walls. A huge library has been shut down and a castle of knowledge closed. I shall personally miss his endearing and humorous company, his enlightening and inspiring stories and his illuminating intellect. His legacy lives in his creative, artistic, filmic works, scholarly studies and teaching. Rest on, Honest man, and great man of letters and the humanities.

Obafemi. FNAL, is the chairman, Reproduction Rights Society of Nigeria (REPRONIG)