Bakayoko at 60: Hurrah to Igilango Geesi!

Abstract

I shall like to begin my tributes to the trade unionist and academic, Biodun Jeyifo by appreciating the fact that the values of a society often begin and end with her elite corps in whatever way they may flower or variegate whether in industry, in public service or in the academy. This, I believe, is the sense in which the scholar and neuro-pathologist, Frantz Fanon meant it when he remarked that every generation, out of relative obscurity, seeks out its own relevance by either fulfilling it or betraying it. One of the compelling symbols of a generation or an age therefore tends to reside in the outlook or appearance of her denizens and those who reveal the courage to act it out and profess it. Many a time this might miscarry into a symptom rather than a phenomenon but they often do arrive at success as in the second generation of literary critics and writers that appeared a decade and a half after Nigeria’s political independence as a colony of Great Britain. Generally, they all tended to be born about the time of Nigeria’s writing of constitutions and coming of age and the period of the Second World War. I specifically refer to the period between 1940 and 1948. They thus appeared with a certain compelling characteristic, a reflexive tendency of character and a penchant for a critical reinvigoration of the age preceding them.