Honouring Jeyifo’s legacy

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“But, how do you push BJ’s scholarship forward? This new generation now, in what ways can they push his work forward? We should strive at all times to find that humanising element in our literary cultural productions.”

Senator Femi Ojudu

“BJ belonged to that formidable Ife tradition shaped by giants like Wole Soyinka and Dr Segun Osoba — a tradition that insisted African literature must speak to power, interrogate injustice, and refuse silence.

“Yet, BJ was not anyone’s echo. He had his own intellectual signature.

What struck many of us was not only what he knew, but how he taught.

He did not intimidate. He did not humiliate. He did not impose conclusions. He invited argument. He challenged assumptions. He asked questions that followed you back to your hostel room and refused to let you sleep. He treated us not as empty vessels, but as minds under construction. And that is rare. Because true teachers do not manufacture disciples. They manufacture thinkers. In his classroom, literature was alive. Marxism was not a slogan; it was an analytical discipline. African humanism was not romantic nostalgia; it was ethical grounding. He insisted that texts must be read in context — and that society itself was a text to be interrogated.

“BJ was never an ivory-tower academic. He embodied the scholar-activist tradition. He understood that ideas are not decorative — they are disruptive. They shape movements. They unsettle power. They equip citizens. He held strong ideological commitments, but he respected intellectual seriousness wherever he found it. That combination — conviction without arrogance — may well be his most enduring lesson. As his scholarship traveled beyond Nigeria, he became a global intellectual voice. Yet, he never lost his rootedness. He was cosmopolitan in reach, but African in his centre of gravity.

BJ belonged to a generation that believed the university was a moral site — not merely a credential factory. If we truly wish to honour him, our tribute must not end in nostalgia. It must provoke renewal…

“Are we still producing scholar-activists? Are we nurturing dissenting thinkers? Are we equipping students not only to pass examinations, but to interrogate society? These are the questions his memory places before us.

Dr. Ogaga Ifowodo

“It’s hard to find one specific place to start from when talking about Prof Biodun Jeyifo. He was a renaissance man, a man of so many parts, whose abilities seem to know no bounds wherever he turned his attention to.

“But in this specific area of literature, culture and society, which we call his life’s work, his contributions are so vast, from the aspect of activism that has already been mentioned to intellectual work and social organizing, it is hard to know where to start from. However, I know that people are going to come from different perspectives, so there’s one aspect I particularly want to highlight. So much has been written.

“BJ represents for me two things, rigor, to the extent that he becomes even his fiercest critic, viewing his positions as contingent, and in the light of new knowledge, information, understanding, insights, is willing to correct the blindness that attended his earlier positions,

Yet Ogaga did a critique of BJ’s position on Soyinka’s casting of Elesin Oba in "Death and The King’s Horseman." 

Well, I disagree with BJ, at least on that last part, because if his claim is for ritual to be effective, it must not be truncated. The process will be allowed to its completion. The question is, so why did Elesin Oba fail to do that, to show that he’s master of his faith, as he claimed? If the colonial factor is merely catalytic, how could it be so determinate?

How could it be so determinate to the point of preventing Eleshin Oba from exercising his will?”

Dr. Chido Onumah coordinator of the Socialist Library and Archives (SOLAR)

“It was through Comrade Eddie that I came to know about Comrade BJ’s interventions, beyond his journalism and critical essays or literary work, in the quest for a just and egalitarian society. I learnt of the active role he and his comrades played “in the strengthening of the foundations and early development of a post-Civil War revolutionary, Marxist formation in the Nigerian students’ movement; the revolutionary conscientisation of peasants and other rural populations in an area stretching from Ode-Omu to Oogi, Ede, Oyo, Ogbomosho, Ife, Ifetedo and Okeigbo [in the South West] between June 1976 and May 1977; the ‘Ali Must Go’ students’ protest of 1978 and its aftermath; the radicalization of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in the early 1980s; and the formation, on revolutionary foundations, of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS).”

“In 2021, on the occasion of the 75th birthday of Comrade Eddie, Comrade BJ was instrumental in founding the Socialist Library and Archives (SOLAR) in Calabar, Cross River State, that seeks to collect and preserve books, pamphlets, journals, newspapers, and documents that capture the intellectual, political, and social struggles of workers, activists, and progressive movements in Nigeria and around the world. This intervention has its origin in the Combined Archives and Libraries of Edwin Madunagu & Bene Madunagu, a product of the joint life of Edwin Madunagu and Bene Madunagu since 1973.

“As the Chair of the Board of Trustees/Advisors of SOLAR, Comrade BJ walked the talk. His devotion to the success of SOLAR stemmed in part from the loss of his books and documents to the elements, but more importantly, his belief that the torch of revolutionary struggle needed to be passed on through such enduring initiatives like SOLAR. Three years ago, as SOLAR struggled with sustainability, Comrade BJ provided a lifeline. He told the management that he had been contracted by a publishing house in the US to do a book on Prof. Wole Soyinka and that he was going to donate the proceeds from the assignment – minus taxes – to SOLAR. He did exactly that. Today, SOLAR is not only collecting and archiving materials, it has started digitising them. Many of these materials exist only in hard copy. Age, humidity, frequent handling, and limited storage conditions place them at serious risk of deterioration and permanent loss.”