Desperate optimism: Biodun Jeyifo and Talakawa journalism

ABSTRACT

The article examines Biodun Jeyifo's contribution, over a period of some 30 years, as newspaper columnist and public intellectual. It traces the evolution of his journalism from print media to the Internet, and the tactical use he has made of the latter to maintain his links with Nigeria from a distance. Focusing on BJ's Talakawa columns, it discusses them through analysis of three aspects of his journalism: his self-conscious use of language and rhetorical devices, both Yoruba and English; his broad subject-categories; and the political efficacy of his intervention.

KEYWORDS:

• Newspapers
• social commentary
• orality
• rhetoric

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. My thanks to the anonymous reader who pointed out that “Jeyifo kept a column with the now defunct Ibadan-based Daily Sketch for two years in the 1970s.”

2. Lapidary: “the elegance and precision of inscriptions carved on stone monuments or things relating to the art of gem cutting”: Merriam Webster.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane Bryce

Jane Bryce, born in Tanzania, was educated there, in the UK and in Nigeria. At the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Biodun Jeyifo was a friend and mentor, and, until he left for the US, supervisor of her PhD. As a freelance journalist and columnist for the Nigerian press, including The Guardian, she shared the same intellectual environment, both academic and journalistic, during the significant period of the mid-80s. Since then, she has taught African literature and cinema at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, where she is now Professor Emerita.