It was an Inaugural Lecture with several differences. There was the fanfare which we can call the Baze University flavouring of the Inaugural Lecture tradition in academia. There was the royal bombshell from Oba Solomon Owoniyi, the Obaro of Kabba. There was the instantaneous by the Chancellor and founder of Baze University to the shocking disclosure by the royal father and there was the remarkable mixed-grill of an audience it was: academics, journalists, politicians, traditionalists, students from far and near and the ubiquitous presence of journalists.
Intervention was right. Prof Adeniyi’s academic story was in the magic of ‘distant witnessing’ or the digital reconstitution of migration in its own technological image and the associated reality of digital determinism. It is such that one could be in Nigeria and be affectively involved in distant spectacles. All such affective experiences of space made possible by emergent digital mediation undergird the claim of displacement of place by space.
Prof Adeniyi put it so well with the phrase ‘the end of departure’, the same thing Castella also call the ‘space of flows’ and the resulting entanglement of memory, identity and belongingness beyond place, location, territory or the ’village’. The interesting dimension to the lecture is how Prof Adeniyi filled-in his audience with the dynamics of that digital determinism.
It was a well-received Inaugural Lecture if the quality of delivery and the approving gestures that greeted most arguments of Adeniyi’s story are anything to go by. But there was a royal storm ahead. As usual, there are no ‘Q and A’ at an Inaugural Lecture. So, other than Rt Hon Emeka Ihedioha, only Oba Solomon Owoniyi was granted the privilege of addressing the audience.
He started by greeting the audience with ‘Happy New Year’. Happy New Year in June? But before anyone could take that as a royal slip of tongue, Prof Adeniyi’s traditional ruler clarified: the Kabba kingdom has and observes its calendar different from the Gregorian calendar. In that calendar, the new year is just starting, meaning that there was no confusion in the ‘Happy New Year’ greeting.
The brilliance of his prefatory statement as well as the text of his formal speech (which we hope some newspaper will run in full soonest) made the Inaugural Lecture a two-in-one offering. There can be no better publicist for the Kabba kingdom than the monarch. He has the language, the cadence and the logic, amounting to an impeccable combination of two compelling power resources: voice and visibility.
He said, for instance, that his kingdom has so many professors but not many Vice-Chancellors, his own way of expressing his community’s appreciation of the appointment of a son of the soil to the VCship of a rising academic centre. But he tells the founder/Chancellor of Baze University: we have more of my people out there. Not acting Oliver Twist but community won’t mind if founder looks for more.
Not if it is a founder with eyes on other realms beyond a university, realms which may need land. Oba Solomon Owoniyi says Dr. Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed should not hesitate to stretch his eyes beyond places where a plot of land could cost a fortune when he can get it nearly free in Kabba land. He earned the applause he got.
He so stunned Datti Baba- Ahmed who wondered how any Nigerian community could have its own calendar outside the Gregorian and the Islamic calendar and that is not a subject of roaring research ever since. The Baze University’s founder announced an instant corrective when he rose to make his post-Inaugural Lecture remarks. He is putting 25 million Naira down for potentially rewarding research into that domain, a challenge to Nigerian and possibly African Anthropologists, Historians, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, Geography and a few more other subjects.
Such knowledge will bring pride to Africa, said Dr Datti Baba-Ahmed who confessed his own ignorance of what he heard from the Kabba Monarch, admitting that his knowledge of vibrant pre-colonial entities hadn’t gone beyond Benin Empire, the libraries in Cairo, ancient world of Mesopotamia, the Indian calendar and such others.
With all these happening within an Inaugural Lecture which took just two hours or so, there is every justification in talking about ‘Inaugural Lecture With Baze University Characteristics’. The Oba’s speech did give the university tradition a Baze University flavour.
