BJ Meets Seinde…Ode to peoples’ comrade
A two-part play, BJ Meets Seinde in honour of the late Emeritus Prof Biodun Jeyifo has been produced by US-based Nigerian scholar, Dr. Kole Ade-Odutola of the University of Florida,
A two-part play, BJ Meets Seinde in honour of the late Emeritus Prof Biodun Jeyifo has been produced by US-based Nigerian scholar, Dr. Kole Ade-Odutola of the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States. It is an imaginary dialogue between BJ and Seinde set in two locations of a lecture hall and the (safe house), dense forest of the Ondo-Osun borderlands. The play is to bring the two great men back to life given their shared history of ‘class suicide’ and their tireless commitment to the Nigerian while alive. Indeed, it was a quiet and intense conversation between two old soldiers of the mind and the soil.
Jeyifo who was a Professor Emeritus of English at Cornell University and of Comparative Literature and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, passed on February 11, at 80. He will be interred tomorrow Wednesday, March 4, in Ibadan, Oyo State.
Dr. Seinde Arigbede, a close pal of BJ, was an actor, humanist and farmer at Ode-Omu in Osun State before he passed on in 2022. Both men lived and died for the liberation of the people. Dr. Arigbede lived among famers in Ode-Omu while BJ lived among students. Both men were members of the Extraordinary Expedition, a clandestine Marxist-Leninist cell in the 1970s that believed intellectual work was hollow without a physical commitment to the liberation of the oppressed.
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Narrator of the play is Grace Uchechukwu Adinku, Goddy Onohwosa plays BJ, Kole-Odutola plays Seinde while music is by Kanayo Omo.
According to Kole-Odutola, who wrote the play, the audio production was created from some Whatsapp messages exchanged between him and BJ, adding that ‘I lifted some of his words to create a dialogue’ in remembrance of both men. I did not know any other way to bring both men to life.’
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The thrust of their conversation covers issues such as class suicide, (radicalism), struggles at ASUU, Soyinka’s report on Seinde, decolonization, post-colonialism, the Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Nigeria (REMLON) days and BJ’s 80th birthday celebration among others.
Reacting to BJ’s remark of his new abode, Seinde tells BJ that he took his time in joining him on the other side, saying “I was starting to think you’d found a way to stay back and organise one last ASUU strike just to spite the establishment.”
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But BJ says “I stayed for the 80th birthday celebrations they threw for me in January. It was exhausting, Seinde. All those tributes—people saying things about me that I’ve spent forty years trying to deconstruct, I felt like a text being misread by its own students.”
As the dialogue continues, Seinde says to his old pal, “That is the burden of leaving, BJ. They turn us into monuments. I’ve been watching from here since ’22. They talk about my “class suicide” as if it were a tragic sacrifice. They still don’t understand that living among the farmers in Ode-Omu was the only way I could remain sane. It wasn’t a death; it was the only real life.”
BJ who recalls that he spent his last days thinking about decolonization—not just of the state, but of the African mind, says he see the young ones having more tools than ‘we did, but perhaps less of that “extraordinary willpower” you had. They struggle to find the center.’
To BJ, “they call it ‘radicalism,’ but for us, it was just... consistency. I looked at the newspapers I brought—spirit copies, of course. Nigeria is still a labyrinth. The same “terrains of struggle” you wrote about, the same marginalization of the small-scale farmer. Sometimes, I wonder if our essays and your grassroots organising were just footprints in shifting sand.”
Reflecting, Seinde wonders if they ‘did arm the people with enough than just ideas? The ‘arms struggle’ of the mind is long, but the physical liberation remains unfinished. The peasantry we loved is still under the boot of a different kind of coloniality now—one with a local face.’
“Nothing has changed. The struggle is a relay, not a sprint. We provided the ‘liberation of the word.’ We proved that a man of high status could cast it all away for a higher cause. That is a weapon in itself. Our lives were a refusal to collaborate with the oppressors. That refusal is the first spark of any true armed resistance,” BJ answers with near hopelessness.
