I have heard a huge share of the stuff he was made of, including his articulation of the Aiyetoro community as a socialist entity in a thesis to Harvard University, at a time positivism was unchallengeable in the world of scholarship. It would be interesting to learn how he accomplished such a miracle. So, even as I would not know I had just passed an Prof Omafume Onoge on the road, his name rang a bell even before I became an undergraduate.
But, in the phone call which brought this about, I wasn’t looking for anything about, from or on Onoge. I was looking for something else. It was Prof Victor Adetula, the voice at the other end, who expanded the discussion in Onoge’s direction. Prof Adetula is not of the Onoge generation, being much, much younger. But he is a beneficiary of that era in university education in Nigeria. or, he is a beneficiary of what the Onoges, Toyos, Onimodes, Onigu Otites and so on were doing to and with knowledge, a lot of it concentrated in the first 5: UI, UNIFE, UNILAG, ABU and UNN before UNIJOS and UNIBEN joined and then the others.
The late Prof Onoge
At the end of the day, Adetula not only brought in ‘The crisis of consciousness in African literature’, a journal article by Onoge, he was sending it to me. I had never heard about the paper but I sensed immediately that it must be in the same grade with Abiola Irele’s The African imagination’. Well, there are many interesting things in Irele’s paper but the one that doesn’t leave me alone is his preference for ‘the African imagination’ as his alternative to ‘African literature’ and the reasons he advanced for the choice and the tension in the reason or the main reason. The main reason puts him on the same side with Ngugi on the language question in African Literature but, in the same paper, he said Achebe had cemented the orality – modern literature transition in Africa by so successfully demonstrating that the African world could be communicated to the larger world using a non-African language.
Prof Onigu Otite, the UI Sociologist who asked whether the elite have a constitutive interest vis-a-vis ethnicity
I thought that was the height of managing complexity in knowledge politics by that generation. That was until Prof Adetula sent Onoge’s paper. I have not read Onoge’s paper partly because I entered the year with an iron deadline that closed off doing any other thing. In truth, I I have run through the paper and, in doing that, the only question that keeps knocking on my being is: how did it happen that Nigeria happened to Nigeria?
Onoge’s paper we are talking about was published in 1974. Yet, by then, he could bring all the far flung issues covered in the paper under a title and subsume them under an argument he defended with so much disciplined intellectual swagger. Is it that they were so well taught? Was it the quietism obtainable then in schools, everywhere in the world, compared to today when the internet alone has turned everyone into omnipresent visualiser? Could it have anything to do with the fact that ‘they’ were mostly on scholarship and had the settledness to read? Or, was he just a prodigy, although most of them in that generation qualify to be called prodigies, especially the historians at Ibadan?
Prof Omafume Onoge and most of them in that generation lived well. Most died at ripe age. So, this is not about wishing he were still alive. Rather, this is wailing over replicability. In other words, are we producing such papers today? Might essays of such depth be circulating from the university system in Nigeria without them being identified as such? Is the system producing PhD with capacity to take an Irele or Onoge’s paper in Literature, for example, overturn, re-assert or even add value to the argument today in Nigeria? Are what the Onoges and other big names produced being well preserved in the libraries? Do we have students who are reading? Who did all these to us?
This has nothing to do with just Literature. All academic disciplines are involved. One would think the discipline of Literature is the least affected by the knowledge crash in the Nigerian case. The situation is more hopeless in the social sciences, from where Onoge went to write papers in Literature.
In the meantime, I have stopped calling Prof Adetula so that he doesn’t send me another Onoge type or someone else’s howitzer, most of which makes one feel a sense of unbridgeable disconnect between a more genuine and glorious past on the one hand and a rather fragile and flakey present. Something that no one talks about. Certainly, I haven’t heard the president, Vice-President, Education minister or even ASUU president talk about the magnitude of decay. It seems everyone thinks it will pass away somehow without a price to pay! We pray it does.
