At his age, anything could happen but the way his voice rang out on the phone each time he called kept such thoughts away. When it happened at 6. 30 pm December 21st, 2020, it came as a surprise.
It is people like Professor Moses Tedheke on the staff list of the Nigerian Defence Academy, (NDA) that gives that university a university status. Not only was he a radical activist, he was also of the Marxist bent. For a military academy to have such a typically insistent Marxist on its staff list does it a lot of credit in terms of diversity of views allowed. This is more so that after his retirement last year, the NDA worked out an arrangement to retain him as a Visiting Professor.
What has kept him in high spirits in the past nine months was the Inaugural Lecture he was scheduled to deliver last March but which could not hold. The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted it. But it only gave him time to keep refining it. Now, the lecture will never be delivered again and we have lost the joy of interpreting the stuff from a multiplicity of lenses, sure that ‘Baba Moze’ would have had the time to reply to all and every provocation.
After watching what became the last moment of Cde Yima Sen recently, one can say that death will always remain a mystery. However, one can also say that Prof Tedheke must have died a happy man. With numerous students of his in all arms of the Nigerian military, he must have died completely satisfied that he had done his duty to God and nation.
He has published quite much. It is difficult to talk of his most rated outing. It could be his “Africa and the Crises of Democratisation: A Dialectical Analysis” but a critical scrutiny of more of his publications could turn out a different verdict. He had gotten his abstract into a compendium outside the country recently and about which he was simply so happy and spoke repeatedly about it during long telephone conversations. These were details he gleefully passed on to Intervention during such conversations. Thinking nothing of death, the details were never written down. And now Prof is no longer accessible. Gone to meet his ancestors!
But he could be blunt. In one Whatsapp post on August 25th, 2020, he wrote, inter-alia: In my “History, Historiography and the Nigerian Condition”, I made a critique. … Only Cheik Anta Diop did such befitting works to the glory of Africa. In Nigeria, the University of Nigeria was on that but somewhere along the line the institution veered off. The History must be total to bring our contributions to humanity not just Islam in Africa, Christianity in Africa, History of Capital in Africa which is end of thinking capacity(etc) as characterising African History today – the root of the great forgetting or obliviousness in History. … We should have it in mind that ancient Egypt was Africans from the Nubian area who became the Pharoses and most ancient development in Science and Technology were African. But Eurocentric historical denials has reconstructed History in favour of Europe because the victors – Alexander the Great and the looters of African developmental processes – Socrates, Aristotle, Plato Pythagoras gave us their versions of history which Ibadan and all of us swallowed hook – line – and – sinker. This is the tragedy of our history….History in our universities is Eurocentric and not Afrocentric which is a contradiction and a terrible one at that. Thanks Comrade.
That was him. His level of Marxism remained the dialectical heritage and it shows in how he framed his contributions as in some of his academic works such as: Theoretical And Doctrinal Foundations Of Nigeria’s Peace Support Operations – A Critique; Politics, Democracy & The Military: A Materialist Analysis; The State, Ideology and Social Mobilisation: An Analytical Evaluation of MAMSER; Nigeria: National Strength and Vulnerability Issues in the Security Question; A Political Economy Explanation of the Nigerian Civil War; Nigeria: Culture and the Democratic Revolution.
He was a classic of the self-made person – from fighting in the Nigerian Civil War as a Non-Commissioned Officer, (NCO) to rising to the status of a Professor. And no arrogance or a culture of bragging. Unfortunately, his types are not those Nigeria honours. As if conscious of this, his students and the community called him ‘Nwalimu’ – Swahili for ‘the teacher’ Could he have received a higher honour? Debatable!
