By Prof Gani Yoroms
Sometimes in March 2024 or there about, Prof Okello Oculi found himself in Bingham University, Karu where he was asking how prepared the university was in terms of establishing AU Mock-Summit. I requested the HOD, Dr Sabo Roberts, to allow him to speak to the students.
Subsequently, he had the opportunity of interacting with some of the students and with whom he had a conversation on Pan-Africanism. Prof Oculi gave the students the rare insight into the working of Rodney’s mind and the consequences somehow traceable to that. Oculi and Rodney met in London. Oculi who was pursuing postgraduate studies at the University of Exeter was already a known name in Pan-African activism and the literati. Rodney had been undertaking his PhD in History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
Rodney, author of the classic of the African conundrum – ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’
Oculi advised Rodney not to go back to Guyana because he was going to be more useful to Africa from where he was. Rodney thought about that but decided to go back to Guyana on the ground that his country needed ideological rebirth. In 1980, he was bombed to death.
The Anglican Girls Grammar School, Abuja is another school that had been benefitting from the Pan-African practice of simulating leadership. It went up to a point they were groomed to stage a performance before the actual African leaders at the AU Headquarters in Addis Ababa. Dr (Mrs) Dlamini Zuma was then the head of the AU then and contributed to making it happen
At the airport in Abuja, security officials were suspicious. They considered the girls too young to travel and but for Dr Akin Adesina, the immediate past AfDB President who intervened, the girls would not have travelled. Most likely to be recent graduates, the security operatives had never heard of the name Prof Okello Oculi nor believed in the staff member accompanying them on the trip.
As at his death last week, Nigerians who are used to the annual performance of his pet project by Pan Africa Club of Anglican Girls Gramma School Abuja were looking forward to it on September 23rd, 2025. Now, he is gone and the fate of the programme might be hanging in the air. But Nigeria needs it. Can the universities he traversed remember him by establishing the Mock-AU Summit on their campuses?
Prof Oculi was the engine room for conscientisation in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria a few decades ago. He was not teaching Marxism like Yusuf Bangura, Prof Kweku Folson, Bala Usman, Sabo Bako and others. He was not Dr Patrick Wilmot who was blending Marxism with Pan-Africanism. He was teaching the ideology and doctrine of Pan Africanism. Oculi was a Pan-Africanist purist.
At a recent appearance at an international conference held in Bingham University, Prof Bayo Olukoshi spoke about producing a Festschrift in his honor. Let’s try and do something to honor Oculi, said Bayo. Although Prof Bayo was Prof Oculi’s student, I am sure it was beyond that. Bayo’s insistence on honouring his former teacher must also be understood as his homage to Prof Oculi’s level of analysis of African history. of course, he taught African Strategic Studies like no other!
The author is a Prof of Political Science and former student of the late Prof Okello Oculi
