The death has occurred of Prof Victor Alumona. He was the Head of the Department of Philosophy at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife at the time of his death. He died Wednesday, May 11th, 2022. It is not clear what killed him but some people suspect he might have reacted negatively to drugs he took after sustaining what an observer called minor burns.
While his nuclear and extended family would be mourning the loss of a bread winner, the university and the nation would be mourning the only academic expert with a PhD in Greek Philosophy in the Department.
Intervention was told that his death means the exit of ‘the man of theories After theories’ “His deep penetration and intellectual habituation of the Greeco-Roman sorority gave him a peerless position in the multilayered world of knowledge articulation, production, dissemination and consumption”, said Dr. Chijioke Uwasomba, Prof Alumona’s nieghbour and friend from the Department of English in the same university.
According to Dr. Uwasomba, what is seen as Greek or better still, Greeco-Roman thought and philosophy gave foundation to modernity and other post(ideational) movements and thoughts that drive the making and understanding of the world. Because of the late Alumona’s embedment in the various thoughts of the Greeks, said Dr. Uwasomba, the late Philosopher was at home with the Ancients and the Modern in his engagement of the world, adding that “his scholarship shows that nothing is new nor old and that what is considered as new is a dialectical leap over and above the previous or existing mode of thought”.
Uwasomba’s further testimony from his own academic encounters with the deceased is that he was a thorough academic of the old order who was not given to writing for writing sake. Through him I got to realise the undying and strong relationships between English words and the Greek language as he gave the etiology of English words which of course had their roots in Greek, said Uwasomba, with the conclusion that in Alumona’s works, there was always the attempt to Africanize the Greek mode of thought showing, in the main, their relevance not only to Africa and its condition but also global civilization. “He was a scholar of scholars and radiated erudition at its highest ideal and relevance to humanity”.
Details pierced together by Intervention shows he was born on Christmas Day, December 25,1958. He attended Saint Theresa’s College, Nsukka, Enugu State before obtaining a degree in Philosophy at the then University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) in 1982. After his National Youth Service in Bauchi, he had a stint as a Federal Labour Officer in the Ministry of Labour and Productivity before going back to the same Department of Philosophy where he took his first Degree to pursue a Master’s. He was subsequently employed as a Graduate Assistant in the university which must be a commentary on his intellectual depth. It was from here he went on to earn a PhD in Greek Philosophy and was the Head of Department until May 11,2022, when he gave up the ghost after a brief illness.
There are no burial details at the time of reporting.
