The country’s literary community, once again, has suffered another death
. Only on Sunday, the passing of Prof. Francis Abiola Irele was
announced. According to sources, he had slipped into coma after a
massive stroke.
With his passing coming on the heels of the demise of Prof. Ben
Obumselu, who died on Saturday March 4, 2017, and Ossie Enekwe, the
founding generation of literary criticism has been grossly depleted.
When mourning ends for the erudite scholar, the question of
timelessness of his work will remain. His literary output seems destined
for immortality, because of the way they are entrenched in the African
canon and aesthetics.
His ideas, it is noted, “composed of numerous, intricately
interlinked concepts, yet suggesting depths of possibility of which the
superstructure realized by the expressed ideations are but the exposure
to light of a complex foundation which may yield to careful study.”
A philosopher, educator, critic and theorist of literature, music and
culture, Irele’s writing was remarkable for its elegance, profundity
and range. His career was striking for the scope of his participation in
the development of modern African intellectual culture, from its
formative years in the 1960s to the present, on different continents.
Born May 22, 1936, in Ora, he moved to Enugu very early in his life.
While he was Edo, and was born in an area in which Ora was predominantly
spoken, the first language he learned was Igbo; he learned Igbo from
the servants who worked for his father and took care of him growing up.
After moving to Lagos in 1940, he began to speak Yoruba. In 1943,
after a fight between his parents, Irele returned to Ora with his mother
where he picked up Ora and developed a fluency in the language over the
course of a year. However, after returning to Lagos in 1944 to live
with his father, he began to predominantly speak Yoruba and maintained
it as his ethnic identification.
Irele’s first encounter with literature was through folk tales and
the oral poetry. His career, in fact, embraced the formative years of
modern African intellectual culture, and its development to the present,
its representative central institutional organs, represented by
editorships in the pioneering journal, Black Orpheus, in the 1960s, to
editorship in later years at Research in African Literatures and
membership of the editorial board of Transition, all these publications
being central points in the development of modern African thought.
Irele graduated from Ibadan University in 1960. Immediately after
graduation, he went to Paris to learn French and completed a Ph.D in
French at the University of Paris, Sorbonne in 1966. He held teaching
positions at the University of Ghana, University of Ife (now Obafemi
Awolowo University), and University of Ibadan.
In 1989, he moved to Ohio State University in the U.S. as Professor
of African, French and Comparative Literature.One of his richest and
most consistent contributions has been in the explication of the
philosophy of Negritude. Irele’s expositions of Negritude are not only
compelling, but also strings central trends of ideas in non-African
civilisations.
Irele helped to expound upon the understanding of Négritude first
theorized by Léopold Sédar Senghor in his article, What is Negritude?,
featured in Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson’s African Literature: An
Anthology of Criticism and Theory.
In his article, Irele defines Négritude as “the literary and
ideological movement of French-speaking black intellectuals, which took
form as a distinctive and significant aspect of the comprehensive
reaction of the black man to the colonial situation…”.
In his collection of essays Négritude et condition africaine, Irele
explores the question of African thought. He begins by rejecting the
notion of ideological difference between anglophone and francophone
Africa. He aims to root African progress in the present and not in a
romanticized past.
This work is also enriched by comparison with scholarship in
classical African philosophies, philosophies that Negritude describes
itself as distilling and representing: the intellectual, artistic and
social dynamics of African culture, in relation to its global context.
Prof. Dan Izevbaye has this about the late Irele: “It is not a
pleasure to be asked to do a sudden tribute to a friend like Biola
Irele, formerly Professor of Literature at Harvard University. I am
dejected, as everyone who knows him would be. But I am not made
speechless by the shock of the news. It is just that with all the
memories crowding in, it is hard to know where to start and when to
stop.”
The erudite scholar said, “Biola was the kind of man of letters who
appears once in a generation; such was his many talents and the force of
his influence. For him, there were no barriers between disciplines; he
moved as easily between literature, sociology, and philosophy, between
cultures and languages, and among people of different races and ethnic
groups.
“An entrepreneur in literary matters, he left an enduring stamp as
critic, editor, teacher and mentor of younger scholars and could have
distinguished himself in the professions of publishing, music and
diplomacy. Up to his last days, his intellect, the vigor of his mind,
had not shown signs of not aging. Up till a few weeks ago, he was still
working on yet another number of his top quality journal, The Savannah
Review, and busy as editor planning themes and in collaboration with
scholars to whom contributions to the volumes of African literature to
be published by Cambridge Press. Biola once said that he would like to
be remembered after his days on earth as a Catholic raising his voice
among a choir around the throne of grace. And remembering the vocal
quality of his performance on earth, what singing that would be. My
heartfelt condolence to his wife, Eka, and his children.”
For Denja Abdullahi, president of Association of Nigerian Authors,
Irele’s passing is a collective loss, “but we should go back to
re-engaging his works to see where we lost it.”
He remarked: “Irele was one of the most outstanding critics of African
literature, who devoted the greater part of his life illuminating the
meaning of writings and the cultural life of the continent.”
Abdullahi continued, “he bestrode the Anglophone and Francophone
literary hemispheres, painstakingly building bridges of understanding
between the two realms. He was a foremost interpretative ideologue of
the Negritude literary movement.”
Abdullahi said, “one remarkable thing about him was that his life was
a lifelong commitment to sustained intellectual inquiry into the works
of African writers; thereby helping greatly the growth of African
literature.”
According to the ANA president, “Irele’s works placed beside those of
today’s literary critics in our ivory towers will reveal a sad
denouement. Critics in the mould of Irele, Izevbaye, Nnolim, Anozie,
Obiechina, Emenyonu and their ilk are no longer there. The emergent or
contemporary writers no longer have critics committed to interpreting
their works to the larger reading world and spurning out novel cultural
and critical theories by so doing. What we have now are nouveau scholars
impatient in the race to become professors so that they can bask in the
glow of the materialist halo it confers on them.
“They therefore write one paper and publish the other to get there
without following any sustained intellectual road map. Writers now write
without any in-depth critical engagement and scholarly labour in the
literary sphere is no longer a quiet and prodigious enterprise of the
type Irele signposted in African literature.”
This is how Prof. Remi Raji captures his tribute to Irele. “He would
be remembered as a master teacher and compelling scholar of African
literary criticism. He brought the discourse of Negritude to us in a
lucid language reminiscent of Jean Paul Sartre, the original olohun iyo,
teacher of teachers of many, Renaissance man, above all, a great
inspiration and a cultured man… adieu.”
While noting that his passing is a devastating loss for all who knew
him personally, as I did, or through his stupendous scholarly work,
Prof. Oke Ndibe said, “he was one of our most insightful and generous
scholars, a man whose weighty books illuminate Africa’s literary
expressions and bridge the gulfs created by British and French colonial
legacies in Africa. Beyond being an extraordinary, world class scholar,
Irele was also a deeply humane person.”
He was best known as the doyen of Africanist literary scholars
worldwide. Irele, no doubt, would have few generational rivals in the
promotion, projection, defense, intellection, propagation, growth and
development of Nigerian literature and criticism. His contributions to
the world literature as a critic rank among the most seminal. Some of
his works include, The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the
Black Diaspora and The African Experience in Literature and Ideology.
