This offering is in honour of a man of many parts and great events, Prof. Biodun Jeyifo, who was laid to rest on Wednesday, March 4, 2026.
The interview at the centre of this offering is an extract from a celebratory publication in commemoration of Prof. Wole Soyinka’s 80th birthday and the award of an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at the University of Ibadan (UI) in 2014. Prof. Jeyifo was the must-interview person on the book project led by Prof. Idowu Olayinka, then Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) and later UI 12th Vice-Chancellor, and Prof. Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, then Dean, Faculty of Arts.
Prof. Jeyifo was not just a scholar, critic, artist, and performer, but also a leftist-wing leader of the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities (ASUU), who transformed tertiary education in Nigeria and remained a strong pillar of support until he stepped into the great beyond. I saw, and still see, the significance of BJ through other dimensions of his work, particularly through the lens of the painstaking effort that culminated in the book Yoruba Travelling Theatre of Nigeria. Even though I would later go on to redefine the operatic tradition in global discourse as Alarinjo, given the adherence of the precursors of the professional travelling theatres to the tenets of the de-ritualized forms of the ancestral mask cult.
In the Nigerian magazine publication, which Jeyifo prefaced with an auto-theoretical and biographical experience, he narrates his earliest encounters with the theatrical traditions of the Yoruba, popularised by the Yoruba travelling theatre, which he witnessed from his primary school days. The narrative gives the reader a first-person account of the experiences and the life of the cast and crew of the travelling theatres. He captures with great enthusiasm his encounters from his primary school days, Ibadan years, and the sharp contrast when he began to live in Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigeria, and travelled to see performances of the travelling theatres in school halls and community centres in South-West Nigeria, as well as hubs where performances of the Yoruba travelling theatre were held. My limited childhood experiences of the performances by a few of the troupes aired on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), Ibadan, station, were incomparable to the imaginations fired up by reading Jeyifo’s Yoruba Travelling Theatre of Nigeria.
Prof. Jeyifo’s formal research activities on the professional travelling theatre of the Yoruba began in 1976, while he was teaching at the University of Ibadan, broadening his own understanding of the theatrical form. He directed and conducted research on the characteristics and social composition of the travelling theatre audiences and the organisational structure of the companies. In 1980, he began more purposive and sustained personal research into the trends, activities, and organisational structures of the theatrical tradition. Over a period of eighteen months, he gathered and personally conducted and supervised the documentation of hundreds of hours of recorded interviews and discussions with leaders and members of several theatre troupes, and then transcribed some of the recorded materials. According to him, he travelled thousands of kilometres on the trail of the troupes on their itinerant tours across five states of Nigeria. From his observations emerged the gap in the existing documentation of the theatrical treasure: “an intelligibility and logico-historical coherence which was an unmistakable expression of the collective identity of the Yoruba people,” and justification for the groundbreaking book Yoruba Travelling Theatre of Nigeria. This became my titillating definition of intellectual ambition and rigour.
Prof. Jeyifo’s archival project accounted for 115 theatrical troupes and companies, verifying the permanent base of about two-thirds of the groups, curating resources, and interviews (particularly special interviews with Kola Ogunmola, Isola Ogunsola, and Funmilayo Ranko). He compiled bibliographical resources comprising theses across institutions on the subject of the Yoruba travelling theatre, newspaper articles, and included several play texts of some of the performances by the earliest and most popular groups, like Moses Olaiya and Duro Ladipo, among others. Prof. Jeyifo drew attention to the fact that there were successful women who were full-time actresses and who owned travelling theatres among the Yoruba. This publication on the Yoruba travelling theatre was a critical resource in comprehending the Nigerian component of my comparative analogies on the operatic tradition in Nigeria and the operatic tradition in Japan. Prof. Jeyifo acknowledged pioneering works on the origins and growth of the Yoruba travelling theatre, but none has the significance nor is as encyclopaedic and compendious as his, which combines the history, movement, and activities, as well as the scope of the theatrical tradition.
I recall Prof. Niyi Osundare’s kind intervention in reaching out to Prof. Jeyifo with respect to being interviewed for the Wole Soyinka UI Project, which commenced rather late and had a very stringent deadline. Prof. Jeyifo, despite his incredibly busy schedule, graciously granted the interview. He painstakingly created time to respond to the questions. I still revisit our correspondence concerning this interview, which will continue to be a significant part of his life that he left for us to keep. As his preface and introduction to Yoruba Travelling Theatre of Nigeria is, so is his preface to Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism—biocritical and auto-theoretical. The preface was more instructive, situating Wole Soyinka’s scholarship in contexts and perspectives. It gave major insight into the rigour and essence of the writing and research process.
I recall learning from the preface that he suffered a six-year slowdown while working on the book due to illness, and I also understood that it takes resilience to complete any task under such circumstances. The resilience with which he came back to complete the work inspired me deeply and gave me the same level of determination to complete some projects I had begun but left unfinished when I suffered an injury. Jeyifo was indeed an influencer for all time. His keynote address at the Association of Nigerian Authors’ “20 Years of the Nobel Prize in Africa,” which necessarily triggered hydra-headed debates, remains undisputable in text and context: Unfortunate Children of Fortunate Parents. BJ’s birthdays were a fiesta of sorts, and he knowingly stepped out when the ovation was loudest.
Farewell… Prof. Biodun Jeyifo
The excerpt…:
” …my first dalliance with high-level theory and criticism” – Prof. Biodun Jeyifo
First I was Wole Soyinka’s student at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels at UI; then I was his junior colleague on the faculty of the University of Ife; finally, in the course of my professional career as a scholar, critic and theorist, I did a great deal of work on Soyinka’s writings and career, work that rightly or wrongly led to a reputation as one of the leading scholarly authorities on WS in the world. There is, of course, a common element that runs through all these phases and expressions of the relationship, and that’s the fact of a profound, even if sometimes critical, admiration for WS, his work and career, an admiration that extends to his influence on my generation of African and Nigerian literary intellectuals.
Like me, he’s a man of the Left, even if his political and ideological allegiances are far more heterodox than mine. I draw attention to this point because too much has been made of the intellectual and ideological battles that we, the so-called “Leftocrats”, waged with Soyinka in the 70s and 80s. As much as there were differences between him and us, there were also commonalities in basic political and philosophical orientations concerning a fundamental radical humanism that we shared with WS. Indeed, even at the height of our ideological battles with him, we collaborated on many progressive artistic and political projects in furtherance of common objectives and shared values.
I won’t get much into the personal dimensions of the relationship with WS that I share with people like Femi Osofisan, Yemi Ogunbiyi, Olu Agunloye, among academics, and Tunji Oyelana, Jimi Solanke, Yomi Obileye, and the late Wale Ogunyemi among actors, musicians, and artistes, all of us being at one time or another regarded as “awon omo Soyinka”. All I will say on this particular dimension is that I, we, entered our young adulthood in an incredibly rich tutelage to WS concerning how to take life and its challenges with a mixture of joie de vivre and a conscionable seriousness that, however, never takes itself too seriously to the point of unctuous self-righteousness.
I was still in secondary school when the 1960 masks was formed and for the period of its prominence as the theatre group to which WS devoted most of his efforts in the creation of a modern and quasi-professional theatre. But as a student at UI, I did join and work with the Orisun Theatre. As a matter of fact, I have a rather interesting story to tell about my experience with the Orisun Theatre. Much of my experience as an undergraduate at UI took place while Soyinka was in detention during the Nigeria-Biafra civil war. He was, in fact, released in the final term or semester of my final year. At any rate, I had joined the Orisun Theatre while WS was in detention and Professor Dapo Adelugba was sort of running the group in Soyinka’s absence. We did stage plays, and we also embarked on television drama, all under the direction of Adelugba. Well, when Soyinka was released, one of the very first things he did was to cancel the television dramas. As he saw it, standards of script-writing and acting had dropped precipitously under the pressure of having to produce a television drama every single week. Well, the cancellation was devastating for most of us since we got paid rather handsomely for our weekly television drama shows. I mean, this was a source of sure and generous pocket money for many of us! We were so upset by Soyinka’s complete cancellation of the television dramas that, although we didn’t wish to see him sent back to detention, we wished that he had taken a long leave after his release from prison! But of course, in retrospect, Soyinka was right, and the whole episode reflects the rigour with which he approached issues of artistic discipline and standards. I might add that some of the most raucous and bawdy songs in Yoruba that most of us know were learnt under WS’s tutelage in the Orisun Theatre. To this day, in private and in public, in a spirit of nostalgia, Femi Osofisan and I sometimes spontaneously break out into fulsome singing of these songs with as much surprise to ourselves as the surprise of our audiences…
Before the most prestigious prizes, especially the Nobel Literature prize, arrived, Soyinka was already known throughout Africa. He was already world famous for his work as a dramatist and our continent’s most consistent human rights campaigner. But he was not quite yet the icon that he was to become a decade or so later. Especially worthy of note was the fact that at that stage, the first full-length scholarly works on Soyinka – by Eldred Jones and Gerald Moore respectively – were yet to appear. Dan Izevbaye and Oyin Ogunba had started writing about Soyinka’s works, but they themselves were still young and were junior scholars, though they were absolutely useful pioneers. In short, and generally speaking, at that period, there were no “dominant perspectives” at all on Soyinka, Achebe, Clark, Okigbo, or any other African writer, with the possible exception of Leopold Sedar Senghor. For instance, I was in my first year as a postgraduate student at UI when Soyinka wrote and staged Madmen and Specialists. In the absence of any existing and influential theoretical and critical frameworks with which to appraise Soyinka’s most daring, most experimental dramatic works, that play confounded just about everybody – the audiences, the critics, even the actors who had roles in the play. It was in the context of that sort of vacuum, that sort of confusion that I wrote a long review of the play and the production in a piece of writing that, without knowing it at the time, was my first dalliance with high-level theory and criticism. I showed Soyinka the review, and he sent it to The Daily Sketch, which published it in full. Years, or even decades later, Niyi Osundare informed me that that review of mine was part of the recommended “texts” for his class when they studied dramatic criticism under the late Professor Joel Adedeji. So, as you can see from this lengthy account, it took quite a while for us all, critics, theorists, scholars, and even actors to catch up with Soyinka’s writing.
As a scholar, teacher, and supervisor, Soyinka of that period was unique and rather very idiosyncratic. I hate to say this, but he did not actually regularly teach the classes assigned to him, or that he assigned to himself, since he was the Head of Department. In the one term or semester in which I was his student as an undergraduate in a course on dramatic criticism, he came to class not more than three or four times! For most of the time, Adelugba or Adedeji stood in for him. But on the occasions when he did take his classes, the quality of teaching and discussion was worth all the classes he had missed by having others take his classes for him. As a supervisor, he took for granted and encouraged the self-reliance of his postgraduate students. Fortunately for me, I had been his student in the last term of my final year, so I knew what to expect. Thus, when he hinted without the slightest pressure that I should rethink my intention to study modern British fiction for my doctoral dissertation and take up the revolutionary African American theatre of the 60s and 70s, 1 sensed that there was something of immense intellectual possibility in his suggestion and I seized on it with great energy and enthusiasm. I have never regretted that decision.
Well, Ibadan was the major arena, the centre of gravity for the seminal work of the “early” and “middle” periods of Soyinka’s career, by far the most productive periods of his career, especially concerning drama and theatre. But we must make a distinction between the city of Ibadan (with, of course, Ul as its intellectual centre) and the School of Drama as it was known before it became a full-fledged Department of Theatre Arts. Don’t forget that, altogether, Soyinka did not spend more than four to five years at the School of Drama/Department of Theatre Arts. He actually started his university teaching career at the University of Ife, Ibadan Branch; moved to the University of Lagos; came to Ul after his release from the long prison detention during the civil war; then moved to the University of Ife in Ile-Ife, from which he eventually retired and became an Emeritus Professor. The 1960 Masks, the first theatre group that he founded, was actually partly based in Lagos and partly based in Ibadan, and Soyinka used to go back and forth between the two cities to rehearse his actors for the same play[s]! Nonetheless, with all these qualifications in mind, Ibadan was the creative kiln in which some of the most accomplished plays of WS were written and first staged. Ibadan was then the unquestionable intellectual and cultural capital, not only of Nigeria but perhaps of the whole continent of Africa. Soyinka stood out among the crop of extraordinarily talented writers and artists in the prodigal artistic harvest of Ibadan in those years, but this has to be seen within the context of two other factors. One: apart from Soyinka, there were other writers, artists, and very talented, very original women and men of the arts in Ibadan in the period. Two: Soyinka’s work as playwright and theatre director was vastly helped, and was enormously facilitated by collaborators like Tunji Oyelana, the late Femi Johnson, Dapo Adelugba, Jimi Solanke, and the late Wale Ogunyemi. And then there were the expatriates like Geoffrey Axworthy, Ulli Beier, Martin Banham, and Dexter Lyndersay.
It is an extremely complex issue to engage as to why Soyinka’s “Ibadan years” coincided with the writing and staging of some of his most accomplished, most experimental dramas. I was very young at the time and cannot give any definitive or privileged insider’s perspective on the question. What I say here comes from reflections from my more mature years and in the wake of the many essays, monographs, and books that I have written or edited on Soyinka’s career. I do not wish to make much of the fact that after the “Ibadan years,” Soyinka gradually shifted more to nonfictional prose, especially memoirs of which he has produced five. Always cognizant of his prodigious talent, we must nonetheless not forget that Soyinka’s most powerful creative works came from the unending turbulence of our postcolonial and nation-building experience. At one stage, drama and theatre were the main forms or media for the engagement of that turbulence, and this coincided with the “Ibadan years”. At another stage, other literary and expressive forms seemed to suit Soyinka better than drama for the same purposes. But I must confess to one wishful, fanciful thought on this very complex issue: I would give anything for Soyinka to have stayed longer, focused more on drama and theatre, even as I know that in his “Ibadan years”, he wrote enough in that genre and medium to have joined the ranks of playwrights who, over the centuries, have written some of the best plays the world has ever known.
Prof. Biodun Jeyifo (2014).
Adedoyin Aguoru
Adedoyin Aguoru, Professor in the Department of English and serving as Director of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Ibadan, where she combines scholarship with leadership in advancing innovative pedagogy.
