First published on April 7, 2019

This week, Tejumola Olaniyan, the Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and African Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, turned 60. In writing this tribute to one of the foremost scholars in the world in the study of the literatures, theatres, popular cultures, social media and genres of artistic and social expression of Africa and its diasporas, let me quickly deal with and then move beyond my personal relationship with him: he was once my student, both in Nigeria and the US (OAU-Ife and Cornell); then he became, simultaneously, my professional colleague and younger friend. And also, to quickly add that Teju, as he is widely and fondly known, was an exemplary student of mine, one of the best that I have had among a large group of former students that I am immensely gratified to have taught and mentored, former students that it would be the prayer of any teacher to have had in their careers.

In writing this tribute, I am immediately struck by the challenge of not over-praising a scholar of Teju’s impressive gifts and accomplishments – except that in this case, the challenge is actually the reverse, which is to say, failure to accord him what is due to him in the very attempt not to over-praise him. First, there is the distinguished body of essays, monographs and books that he has published singly under his own name. Some of these have become reference points for other scholars around the world in African and Diasporic studies. On the strength of these self-authored works of scholarship alone, Teju’s place in the front ranks of global African studies is already assured. For instance, there is his first published book, Scars of Conquest, Masks of Resistance, which, even for a first book, still magisterially compares the dramas of Africa, African America and the Caribbean. Also notable is Arrest the Music!: The Rebel Art and Politics of Fela which, together with Sola Olorunyomi’s book on Fela, more or less founded the global academic industry on the life and career of the radical musical superstar. And there are also the essays and articles on diverse aspects of the theatre, literature and postcolonial studies of Africa and the other spaces and locations of the global South, many of them teasing out connections and implications either ignored or misrecognized by other scholars.

But beyond that distinctive body of works stamped with his personal register, Teju has worked assiduously and extensively with other scholars to co-produce or co-edit some of the landmark and indispensable books in the field. Indeed, as I write this tribute in my study, I am looking at these books that will be found on the shelves of the personal “library” of most scholars in our field: Taking African Cartoons Seriously: Politics, Satire and Culture (Michigan State Univ. Press, 2018); State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings (Indiana University Press, 2017); Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (Duke University Press, 2016); African Diaspora and the Disciplines (Blackwell, 2010); African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (Blackwell, 2007) In all these tomes jointly produced with other senior and junior scholars, Teju has demonstrated a capaciousness of scholarly productivity, an influence among peers that very few in academia ever achieve. This requires a brief explanation.

In this matter, academia does not differ from the general principle that in the life of modern intellectual, political and cultural professions institutions and professions, nothing matters as much as being genuinely and widely respected by others in one’s profession. However, it is necessary to point out that unlike many other professions – lawyers, doctors, engineers, accountants and scientists – among academics, only a select few ever achieve this distinction of the admiration or even veneration of their colleagues. In plain language and with reference to literary academics in particular, lucky, very lucky is the woman or man that enjoys the universal respect of all scholars in her or his field. Teju Olaniyan is, at the current time, one of the few of whom this can be said in global Africanist literary and cultural studies. I would like to briefly reflect on the nature of this achievement through the prism of a parable about modern intellectuals that was very influential around the middle of the last century.

In 1953, Isaiah Berlin, the great British Marxist cultural theorist, in a celebrated essay published in 1953 on Leo Tolstoy and Russian intellectuals of the pre-revolutionary era with the title, “The Fox and the Hedgehog”. This is the essay that first gave a typology of modern intellectuals and intellectualism that has become widely accepted as a sort of guidepost. In the essay, Berlin, adapting one of Aesop’s famous fables, divided all modern academics or intellectuals into two broad types, each one corresponding to either the fox or the hedgehog. The fox typically travels ceaselessly from one farmyard to another in an endless search for livestock and produce to meet his wants. He never stays in one fixed place but perambulates through the vast expanse of a region, of a country, indeed of several countries since the fox observes no boundaries between farmyards, districts, regions and countries.

In contrast, the hedgehog lives all her or his life in one field, one farmyard in which she/he both burrows deep into the soil and ferrets across every inch of the farm. On account of this deep and wide rootedness in one place, the hedgehog knows just about all that is there to know about the past and the present of the farmyard. From these two profiles, Isaiah Berlin drew his famous typology of modern intellectuals: those, like the hedgehog, who stay at home and both dig deep and look everywhere in the native soil of knowledge and wisdom; and those who, like the fox, travel restlessly and ceaselessly, gathering all the lore, all the ideas and tales of distant and faraway lands. Concluding his parable of modern intellectualism in that essay, Berlin decided that since it is near impossible to be both the fox and the hedgehog in the modern context of the vast expansion and comingling of knowledges from multiple and diverse areas of the world, one must be highly conscious of what it now entails to be either one or the other, the fox or the hedgehog. In the essay, Berlin did leave open the possibility that a few or a rare order of intellectuals attempt to be both the hedgehog and the fox.

It ought to give us an indication of the quality of Teju’s achievement as a scholar that as soon as I began to gather my thoughts together for this tribute, Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay came almost spontaneously to my mind – but with a twist. Let me explain. So, it is no longer possible to be both the hedgehog and the fox since in our contemporary world the explosion of knowledge, indeed of knowledges, has become forbiddingly too expansive? Well, we have seen the emergence of scholars that combine the strength and uniqueness of their own individual productivity with the collaborative productivity of other gifted toilers in the field. From this, but only as an aggregate, as a makeshift collectivity, we have seen exemplary cases in which the hedgehog and the fox combine in the work of scholars whose personal contributions are indivisible from their inspired collaborations with other scholars, young and older, at the beginning and at the peak of their careers.

Here, I am thinking of a scholar like the late Abiola Irele. I am thinking of the quality of Irele’s own individual intellectual production, side by side with the extraordinary value of his many collaborations with just about everyone in the field. Of course, I do not ignore the fact that Teju has just turned 60 – which is a long way from the 81 years of Irele’s life. And neither have I lost sight of the fact that Irele exercised a great intellectual influence on Teju himself and may very well have been an unconscious model or inspiration for Teju’s also unconscious aspiration to achieve, like Irele, an integration of the best of the “fox” and the “hedgehog” in his lifework. This observation leads me to the central axis around which I wish to arrange my most important reflections in this tribute which, in the title of the tribute, I am calling the dialectics of morounmulo and morounmubo.

In a literal and non-idiomatic sense, the words mean, respectively, “I go into the world laden with gifts” and “I return home bearing treasures from my sojourn abroad”. More expansively, in the two terms, we are in the universe of exchanges, borrowings and appropriations between the entirety of the world’s languages, cultures, traditions, knowledges and beliefs. The two terms in combination connote both ancient and modern universes of the exchange of ideas and values across the world; after all, our species has always travelled, migrated and comingled. Above all else, in these two terms we are in a universe of travel, of sojourn in foreign lands among racially or ethnically different peoples.

In morounmubo, which is the primary and much better-known of the two terms, a returnee from a long sojourn in a foreign land, announces that the scholar has returned home laden with a bountiful harvest of the fruits of her time and labor away from home. In this respect, the best of morounmubo are spiritual or psychic gifts of a non-material nature, like wisdom, like a heightened appreciation of the unique and priceless individuation of oneself and/or one’s people, one’s culture among all the other peoples and cultures of the world. Finally, the thing to keep in mind about morounmubo and morounmulo is the fact for a very long time, it was generally believed that Africa and Africans had little or no morounmulo while, conversely, they always took “morounmubo” far in excess of their parlous “morounmulo”.

In his poem on Abiola Irele’s death, Wole Soyinka calls death and the afterlife the “diaspora of no return”. To which I add here that for most intellectuals of the African world, the diasporas of our continent in the rest of the world are places of endless cycles of sojourns and returns. You could in fact say that this is true of the intellectuals of all the regions of the contemporary world: for all of us, the boundaries, the borders separating homelands from diasporas have almost completely disappeared. The return home is never complete; the journeys back – again and again – to the diasporas are never-ending. Only that eschatological “diaspora of no return” escapes from this “law”. In the case of global Africanist literary and cultural studies, this is fundamentally constitutive of the field. Where is the scholar in this field today, anywhere in Africa and the African diaspora, who does not aspire to be widely and solidly grounded in the literary and cultural productions of both the African continent itself and, at the same time, those of the diasporas in the Caribbean, the Americas and, increasingly, Europe?

Tejumola Olaniyan is in the advance guard – i.e. the avantgarde – of this new formation. Before him, there had been the pioneers, the pacesetters like Irele, Ulli Beier, Okpewho, Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Micere Mugo, Kalu Ogba. Because of their work, their collective contribution, Teju and his generation now have a much more solid sense of “morounmulo” than did previous generations of African scholars abroad in the world arena. Furthermore, you could say that Teju’s work, his productivity, in at least the last ten years, has been largely predicated on this constitutiveness of journeys back and forth between home and diaspora, nation and the world. He is acutely aware of Africa’s structural disadvantages, its “development of underdevelopment” in the global order of neoliberal capitalism, together with their effects on institutions and practices of the state on the arts and the media in our continent.  But unlike in the past, this “unhappy consciousness” is deeply inflected with a sense of possibility, of an openness to a futurity that is not decreed but must be achieved by us.

Will he ever return home permanently? A nostalgic question, one which increasingly seems to be belated or anachronistic, even if it cannot not be asked, not only of Teju but of all of us whose situation is as translocal as his. Surely Nigeria and Africa need scholars of achievement and his generosity back home! Ah, but do not forget: “morounmulo” and “morounmubo” now have very different  connotations from the time when the boundaries between “home” and “world” were very solid. Madison, Wisconsin is very far from Ile-Ife, the place where I first encountered Teju and his extraordinarily gifted classmates. But I say this now with a completely different notion of what is possible between “Madison” and “Ife” than I would have said three decades ago. Think, think very productively, Teju, on “morounmulo” as you do on “morounmubo”.

Many years and decades of productive and fulfilling personal and professional life!

Biodun Jeyifo

Originally published by The Nation Newspaper