Jeyifo's turns of epigraphic traditions in “Talakawa Liberation Courier/Herald”

ABSTRACT

Biodun Jeyifo's newspaper column writing provokes a new understanding of leftist praxis in Nigeria in two ways: first, the frequent quotation of proverbs and apothegms brings an uncommon ideological perspective to African ordinary language analysis; second, the sayings are used in remarkably unprecedented manners to subtend the formulation of an activist ethics termed ìwàlẹ̀sìn (conducts of being manifest spirit).

KEYWORDS:

• Jeyifo
• talakawa
• African Leftist Praxis
• quotation culture
• ethics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The two peer evaluators of this article both objected strongly to this observation. One called it a cliché. While I do acknowledge that Cabral's Return to the Source gives close attention to the proper – which is to say realist and historicist – ways of how the African revolution should relate to traditions, the focus in that book is not an engagement with traditions as analytical constructs but a refutation of their misappropriation in racialist Africanisms. The same is the case with Fanon in Wretched of the Earth. More convincing for me is the point that a handful of leftist writers and scholars of Jeyifo's generation studied and embraced verbal traditions, analyzed their aesthetics and politics, and even adopted them as models of address. G.G. Darah's scholarship on the udje satirical traditions in Nigeria's Urhobo society, Femi Osofisan's riddle dramaturgy in several plays, and Niyi Osundare's accessibility poetics, stand out in this regard. Nonetheless, Jeyifo's sustained references to traditional verbal traditions and his mining them for ordinary language analytical insights about materialist activism are unique.

2. Besides Hausa, there are only four other Afriphone translations of that leftist classic: Zulu, Arabic, Afrikaans, and Malagasy. The Sunday opinion pages of The Nation also carry columns written by Ropo Sekoni and Adebayo Williams, two of Jeyifo's left leaning former colleagues at Ifẹ̀'s Literature in English department. Quoting tradition in his own way, Williams writes under the pen name of Tátalọ̀ Àlàmú, a neo-traditional virtuoso singer from the city of Ibadan. Sekoni is a well-known scholar of trickster traditions.

3. He also told me in the email that he has not published any strictly scholarly elaboration of what I have summarized as the ìwàlẹ̀sìn doctrine and sent me the more than a thousand-page Word file of the collection of columns that was then in production and now has been issued as Against the Predators’ Republic.

4. “Conduct” and “being” are both indicated in usages of ìwà in everyday Yorùbá.

5. See his interview with Kunle Ajibade.

6. “Between Ourselves and Our Institutions and Between Marx and Rousseau (2).” (29 March 2015)

7. For example, Jeyifo was a regional leader of the Student Christian Movement (SCM) of Nigeria while he was at Ibadan Boys High School where, for leading a “student revolt against school authorities,” he was expelled in his final year in 1964.

8. I have added tone and diacritical marks in all the Yorùbá quotes for ease of reading, although the original omitted them completely.

9. In full: “Olúwa yó pa àlọ àti àbọ̀ rẹ mọ́ láti ìgbà yìí lọ, àti títí láéláé (The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore).” (Psalm 121:8)

10. Dẹmọ is the Yorùbá inflection of the name of Nigerian National Democratic Party, a major player during the country's early, post-independence years.

11. Jeyifo returns to the statement five months later on 8 January 2015 to introduce his reflections on why the poor classes often vote against their own interests under the banner of ethnic unity.

12. “Jonathan's Supporters’ Predicament: Capitulation, Desperation or Armageddon?” 8 February 2015. The proverb is also adapted as the title of Teju Cole's first novel, Everyday is for the Thief.

13. “Barawo,” originally Hausa, means thief.

14. “Mixed signals and ambiguities galore: scattered reflections.” ( 5 July 2015)

15. “Pope Francis, the talakawa Pontiff: a man for our times, a man for all ages.” (27 September 2015)

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Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ is the author of Arts of Being Yorùbá (Indiana UP, 2017) and Proverbs Textuality and Nativism in African Literature (University Press of Florida, 1998).