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• 06 Mar, 2026

Professor Biodun Jeyifo (1946-2026): The Scholar-Activist - A Biographic Tribute by Pambazuka News Biodun Jeyifo, known to friends and students as "BJ," was a titan of African literary criticism and a relentless champion for worker rights and social justice. Born in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1946, Jeyifo emerged as a brilliant intellectual early in life, becoming only the third person to earn a First Class degree in English from the University of Ibadan. This academic excellence set the stage for a career that would span continents, from the lecture halls of Cornell and Harvard Universities to the picket lines of Nigerian labor struggles. After his doctoral studies at New York University, Jeyifo returned to Nigeria during a period of intense political ferment and class struggles. He did not remain ivory-towered; instead, he became a founding father of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), serving as its first president. He believed that a scholar's duty was not just to interpret the world, but to change it. His Pan African convictions and "Bolekaja" (confrontational) style of criticism challenged both the military dictatorships in Nigeria and the Eurocentric biases in global academia. Jeyifo's scholarly legacy is most deeply tied to his work on Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. He was widely considered the world's foremost authority on Soyinka's drama and poetry, famously publishing Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism. His writing was never merely aesthetic; he analyzed literature as a mirror of power, exploring how African writers navigated the trauma of colonialism and the disappointments of the post-independence era. In the late 1980s, Jeyifo moved to the United States, teaching first at Cornell and later at Harvard, where he held professorships in African and African American Studies and Comparative Literature. Despite his status in the Ivy League, he remained "resolutely rooted" in Nigeria. For decades, he maintained a weekly column in The Guardian and The Nation (Nigeria), titled "Talakawa Hijrah," where he wrote for the common person -- the Talakawa -- about the struggle for a "Republic of the People" over what he called the "Predators' Republic." Professor Jeyifo passed away on February 11, 2026, leaving behind a void in the worlds of literature and activism. He was buried in his beloved Ibadan on March 4, 2026. He is remembered not just as a brilliant critic who decolonized the global curriculum, but as a man who proved that the most sophisticated mind could also possess the most courageous heart. I: Carole Boyce Davies, Chair and Professor of African Diaspora Literatures, Howard University I met Biodun Jeyifo, affectionately called BJ, a few weeks after I arrived at the University of Ibadan to begin a PhD in English studying African Literature on a Commonwealth Scholarship from the government of Trinidad and Tobago. BJ had recently returned as a newly-minted PhD from New York University to be a professor in the Theatre Arts Department. His fresh perspectives became enduring examples to younger graduate students like G.G. Darah and me as we were both working on PhDs on similar subjects. Ibadan was still the premier institution for the study of African literature even while the colonially-inspired legacies of British approaches to literary studies prevailed among the faculty. Instead, with BJ, here was a young Marxist professor with bold and striking approaches to ways of being an engaged scholar who brought that same contestatory passion to intellectual analyses that he was since known for throughout his career. Biodun Jeyifo, who, older faculty were quick to point out, had Africanized his last name which was Jeyifous, was even then an example of fearless criticism. With a group of like-minded scholars, they created what was called bolekaja criticism taking the term from the young men who touted on local transport vehicles, and was translated as "come down and fight." This was an approach meant to contest older lingering colonialist approaches and to challenge institutional conservatism. BJ, as he was affectionately called then by all, became an example for in-process graduate students like me of being a courageous scholar unafraid to challenge institutional scholarly paradigms which maintained exclusions of more progressive analytical approaches. Beginning a career as a scholar with such an example has marked my continued approach to teaching and scholarship and with a kind of mandate that we have a responsibility to always bring a fresh and sometimes contestatory approach to knowledge production when needed. In the Theatre Arts Department at Ibadan, where he was on faculty, BJ was part of a triumvirate with Kole Omotosho and Femi Osofisan. I remember them sparring with Jimi Solanke who was the lead actor in Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman during public rehearsals about his representation of Elesin Oba, for an upcoming production at Ibadan and Ife. He insisted repeatedly that the lead actor in that role needed to heighten the contradictions Soyinka intended and not present Elesin Oba in only a more traditional posture but as one loaded with the conflicts manifested in the play's resolution. In fact, my first academic essay, perhaps inspired by this approach, was titled "Maidens, Mistresses and Matrons. Feminine Images in Selected Soyinka Works" published in In Interdisciplinary Approaches to African Literature, ed. by Arnold et al, (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1984): 89-99. The young virgin in the unfolding of the great man's lifecycle as earlier expressed in his play, "The Lion and the Jewel" and of course heightened in Elesin Oba's final choices of the world of the flesh via the virgin as opposed to fulfilling his assigned task was for me just as salient as that of the young woman who becomes only a usable/disposable victim without agency in this process. In an essay titled "Tragedy, History and Ideology: Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman and Ebrahim Hussein's Kinjeketile" in Marxism and African Literature edited by Georg Gugelberger (AWP, 1986) would also indicate that Death and the King's Horseman remained a "bourgeois" historical tragedy in its resolution. Yet his friendship and relationship with Soyinka, I am sure, pushed the playwright/nobelist into interesting positions over the years. BJ would go on to produce several other studies of Soyinka's extensive creative repertoire and was identified as the foremost scholar of Soyinka's works. The critical point, though, is that back then the Department of Theatre at Ibadan in the late 1970's was a place of contestation, creativity and challenge. Scholars like Omafume Onoge, an African Marxist critic, would have had a profound impact on the younger BJ then as he also did on G.G. Darah. Onoge's essay, "The Crisis of Consciousness in Modern African Literature: A Survey" (republished in Marxism and African Literature, edited by Georg Gugelberger (Africa World Press, 1985: 21-49) was seen then as one of the exemplars and major breakthroughs to an alternative way of thinking of what African literature and its criticism could be. For me, as a young African literature scholar then, particularly because this essay included a framing of African literature as inclusive of a range of African Diaspora writers, including Aime Cesaire. It is still an essay worth returning to as its bibliographic citations provide an extensive range of writers for an alternative canon of African literary criticism. The immediate contrast with Onoge would be Abiola Irele, then the leading scholar of a more conservative reading of Negritude and African literature and a professor in the French Department at the University of Ibadan before migrating to the U.S. This was still a time when the major African literary scholars still resided and taught out of what was then the premier African university before a grand migration of that university's intellectual prowess to various universities in the United States. Meanwhile, the younger generation of which BJ was a member spearheaded an approach that challenged the valorizing of traditional culture for its sake in a kind of uncritical African-centred "mythopoeic" approach as identified by Darah, which they saw as effected via the Soyinka-created "Ogunian" paradigm. Significantly, during my days at Ibadan, BJ, who lived on campus with his wife and two small children, began to work simultaneously with unions and left organizations with the intent to push a more progressive Nigerian politics into something which would be at the center of a transformed Africa. Sadly, these did not become a reality in his lifetime. Still, BJ remained at the same time a guiding light for young scholars wanting to advance intellectual projects beyond sterile and outdated residual colonialist approaches to literary criticism and cultural theory. The first major documentation of this approach would be The Truthful Lie. Essays in the Sociology of African Drama and The Yoruba Popular Traveling Theatre of Nigeria. An ongoing debate with Wole Soyinka produced an edited collection, Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity (2001) published during his Cornell years; Conversations with Wole Soyinka (2001) and Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism in African and Caribbean Literature (2009) and The Locations and Dislocations of African Literature: A Dialogue Between Humanists and Social Scientists, with Eileen Julien (2016). Because I was hired in the same time frame at the State University of New York, Binghamton, in the mid 1980's, which coincided with BJ's tenure at the English Department at Cornell University, I was able to be a continuing beneficiary of his big brotherly friendship and advice as Ithaca was only then about a half an hour drive away. It was not unusual then for the scholars working on African literature and living in upstate New York to attend lectures at both places, particularly during the time of Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah's presence at Cornell and Wole Soyinka's subsequent appointment there as well. Looking back, an amazing constellation of scholars inhabited that upstate New York landscape with visits from Jacques Derrida or Francis Lyotard and several major feminist scholars who would also visit Binghamton or Syracuse University. Memorable as well was a Stuart Hall residency at Binghamton. On the personal side as well, I remember BJ's joy at meeting my two daughters at an African Literature Association conference in Guadeloupe. Yet, even as one valorizes this constellation, the burgeoning studies of black women's literature by scholars like me provided a reading of what I saw as the missing gender consciousness in even leftist scholars like BJ, which spilled over into his personal relationships. A letter he circulated to all in his surrounding academic community about a daughter he felt tricked into producing remains in my files. For people like me who witnessed or experienced similar abandonments of paternal responsibility in the Caribbean, which were indicated as generated from former patterns of enslavement in which men could not claim ownership of their children, it was surprising to see this from an African scholar, where we were taught that progeny always had a place, regardless of how they were created. As a result, my concern was always also the well-being of this young girl, now a grown adult, regardless of the circumstances of the conception. Still, a powerful memory that validates his sense of fairness was his attendance at a conference at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell, where the issue of a colleague who had publicly referred to graduate students pejoratively was an important and divisive concern. BJ spoke publicly in condemnation of this scholar and, in fact, demanded that his former student, also now deceased, go and bring the offending party to the conference so that he could apologize to the community. This, of course, was never resolved as BJ wanted, but his endearing challenge of this explicitly manifested sexism demonstrated that he was clearly rankled by this absence of professional/intellectual/personal integrity and conduct. The overarching intellectual and political power of BJ throughout his life dominated and for me it was gratifying to witness his extensions into the larger African Diaspora as he reported happily connections with John LaRose of New Beacon Books and the George Padmore Institute and his participation in the London Black Radical Book Fair. He was also ecstatic to report to me that he had established relationships with Caribbean union members and was planning a visit to Trinidad as he built connections there. I saw BJ for the last time at the seminar for Selwyn Cudjoe at Wellesley and remember in his talk that he began by saying that he could see the ancestors beckoning from a distance, though they were still far off. I want to imagine him then as receiving a happy welcome from those ancestors from Africa and the Caribbean. II. David Abdulah, Political Leader, Movement for Social Justice and Former Leading Member of the Oilfields Workers' Trade Union, Trinidad and Tobago I first met Biodun "BJ" Jeyifo in March 1982. The occasion was the First International Bookfair of Radical Black and Third World Books and the associated Bookfair Festival, that historic political and cultural intervention initiated by New Beacon Books, Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications and Race Today Publications. John La Rose, who was the European Representative of the Oilfields Workers' Trade Union was the inspirational leader of the Bookfair. I attended that first Bookfair together with another member of the Union's Executive, Horace Scott. BJ and other Comrades from Nigeria - Kole Omotoso, GG Darah - were key participants This Bookfair was truly, as the Commemorative publication describes, "A Meeting of the Continents". It provided a unique space for radical political activists to engage with artists and intellectuals and to interrogate the moment in which we were. Crucially, it enabled us to learn about the struggles for social and racial justice that were taking place elsewhere. Remember, this was way before the internet and search engines. Close friendships and political bonds of solidarity were established through the Bookfairs. One such bond was between the Comrades in the Oilfields Workers' Trade Union (OWTU) and our emerging political movement - the Committee for Labour Solidarity (Preparatory) - and Comrades involved in the post-colonial struggle in Nigeria. BJ and Kole visited Trinidad on a number of occasions. In September 1984, BJ attended the 45 Annual Conference of Delegates of the OWTU, and we seized the moment to hold a seminal Public Forum themed "Africa, Europe and the Caribbean". The other panellists were Darcus Howe (Trinidad and the UK) and Tim Hector of Antigua. BJ identified his topic as the "Class Struggle in the post-colonial state in Africa -the Nigerian Example". Here is a short quotation from that talk: "...we must start in the colonial period and not only must we start there, but we must do something else that is not usually done, we must recognise immediately that colonialism is meaningless if it is not understood as colonial capitalism. It is not just colonial subjugation; it is colonial capitalism. It is a system of capitalist exploitation, capitalist organisation of production and distribution in a colonial context...Because colonialism by itself is by nature very exploitative and fascist". That was BJ in 1982. He was absolutely clear about the nature of colonialism and therefore our post-colonial condition. Fast forward 44 years, and BJ's analysis speaks directly to how we need to understand the world today. The world of US imperialism pursuing its colonial agenda as stated in one of the objectives of the US National Security Strategy "restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere... We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere...This 'Trump Corollary' to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities". The attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its President and First Lady - in order to control Venezuela's oil; the desire to take over Greenland; calling Canada as the 51 State; the so-called peace plan for the Democratic Republic of the Congo involving access to that country's rich mineral resources; the bombing of Nigeria (as a first step to getting control of the countries in the Sahel); now the bombing of Iran and thus subjugating the entire Middle East and its oil and gas resources to US control; can only be understood if we use BJ's framework - "colonial capitalism". And lest we take our eyes off the ball, Cuba is the next target. For if the Cuban Revolution can be destroyed, then which country will be able to stand up to US imperialism, which people will be as united and conscious and prepared to defend their sovereignty, their dignity and their right to self-determination as our heroic Cuban sisters and brothers? BJ also admonished us in that talk that if we don't link colonialism with capitalism, we won't avoid "being unscientific, very emotional and subjective". So, as our anger mounts against US imperialism, we need to ensure that our response is not simply manifest on the emotional level. We need to be strategic and focused as we organise in our own spaces to battle this colonial capitalist agenda, and one which is increasingly fascist. BJ and Kole were also with us in Trinidad for the 50 anniversary of the OWTU and the 1 Caribbean Peoples Bookfair and Bookfair Festival (patterned after the London Bookfairs) of which the OWTU was a leading organiser. This was in June 1987. This was a manifestation of the bonds of friendship that were established earlier. They contributed to the panel discussions and other activities. They gave us an understanding of Nigeria and Africa that wasn't subjective or emotional, as is the wont of some who wrongly believe that the leaders of governments in Africa have to be progressive and supported just because they are African. At one time or another, they stayed in my home. We limed, shared a drink after the work was done, partied - I remember the beach party that we had in Tobago as one of the Union's 50 anniversary events! He also made his home at Cornell available to my colleague Roberta Kilkenny and me when she organised a lecture tour for me in upstate New York. BJ wasn't there at the time, and it was being occupied by Selwyn Cudjoe. Locksley Edmondson was our host at Cornell for the talk that I did. And there were the political debates - conducted in great earnest in London at the Albert Road, Finsbury Park home of John LaRose and Sarah White and in Trinidad. BJ was a great debater and conversationalist. He told stories about Nigeria and its ruling class that were at one and the same time deadly serious and hilarious. He had a tremendous sense of humour and an even more powerful intellect. We were not about knowing the world but actively engaged in the (class) struggle to change it! Sadly, BJ and I did not meet up in the last 20 years as the opportunities created by the London Book Fair were not easily replicated. However, I am sure that just as I consider him a friend and comrade, so too would he view me in a similar light. It was an honour to have known you, BJ! Your life's work is done, and you are now with the Ancestors. Somewhere, you, Kole, John, and so many others who were part of that Bookfair family are having a tremendous discussion about the world today. Oh, to be a fly on that wall! Source: https://www.pambazuka.org/index.php/node/100000243