Professor Nelson Olabanji Fashina of the Department of English, University of Ibadan (UI), has had many days of glory. Thursday, May 11, 2023, was another day of glory for this 62-year-old man of humble background, who lost his father at 13, and fate put his survival and destiny in the hands of his paternal grandmother and Aunty, Princess Christianah Olabisi Aladejebi (nee Fashina), who sponsored his education from secondary school to the university level until he secured a scholarship to finish his postgraduate education. It was the day when he was bestowed with the honour to present the nation’s Premier University’s 523rd inaugural lecture as the 11th presenter from the English Department, inside the historic hall of intellectual propitiation, the Trenchard Hall.
His inaugural lecture is titled, “Text, Grammatology and the Automation of Theories in (African) Literary Discourse”. This average-height literary critic and stylistician stood tall before scholars of different statures, including a foremost playwright, Professor Femi Osofisan, a leading linguist, Professor Ayo Bamgbose, and foremost literary icon, Professor Dan Izevbaye, traditional rulers including Olowo of Owo, Oba Ajibade Ogunoye III, students, family and friends and well-wishers, who were held spellbound for an hour the lecture lasted and wished for additional minutes of grace to drink more from the fountain of this scholar.
Not taking the calibre of his audience for granted, Fashina acknowledged, “It is an offering of great excitement that, I am, at last, scheduled to stand before this august assemblage of scholars, a community of masters, patrons, and students of the intellectual ivory tower in the Premier University of Ibadan, to deliver this historic Inaugural Lecture today, 11th day of May 2023. …This academic fulfillment has come after about thirteen years that I have achieved the rank of a professor in my rather dangerously argumentative field of study – literary and linguistic criticism of text/discourse – creative writings, oral/verbal poetics, speech, in English expression.” He proudly added, “I stand on behalf of the premier Faculty of Arts in Nigeria to deliver the eleventh in the series of Inaugural Lectures from Nigeria’s premier Department of English.”
The lecturer did not spear his audience about his childhood ordeals, which at a point dashed his hope of going far in his educational pursuit or succeeded in life, stressing, “I feel like a hero in triumph over life travails. … I stand before this august audience as a battered but victorious hero with laurels wreaths of life succeeded in many ways, but one – involuntary polygamism, instead of serial monogamism.”
Setting the pace, Fashina quickly whetted the appetite of his audience with a nucleus strand of his lecture when he notified them, “I am overly immersed in split feeling of astonishment and fear. For a while, it is amazing to stand here and unfold the provenance of my academic research and teaching in the last 34 years, I am particularly in trepidation of my compelling assignment: for in my verbal gyrations around this topic today, I cannot avoid to unfold the grim and extenuating problems that are integral to the politics of research and scholarship in my field and the way it typified the social forces of my nation. I have to engage this intellectual politics at certain junctions of my critical and argumentative analysis in this one-time inaugural lecture.”
Fashina conceptualised what Inaugural Lecture is by pointing out that it is a moment of formal academic “confession”, accountability, restitution and atonement of a professor’s aggregates of research and publications – an object of contributions of knowledge. According to him, “An inaugural lecture is an eloquent defence of a professor’s academic research and publications (knowledge contributed) before a mixed global audience of town and gown!”
Fashina, a controversial fearless scholar, reminisced on a paper he wrote in 1996 to argue about the silent aspect of scholarship, “I wrote an unpublished article in atonement for the ironic sins of scholarship in which I reasoned that scholarship which is meant to bring peace, progress, and development to the world through its knowledge, sometimes achieves the opposite. … Sometimes, knowledge ironically brings chaos to the world, because of its abuse through misappropriation to negative and selfish values by the pro-capitalists of knowledge – that is the universities – the universe of knowledge.” Speaking against academic mediocrity, he registered his displeasure with the empty politics of the academia, because it drains the brain to the gutter.
This teacher of teachers highlighted another fear, which emanates from the foundation of intellectual polemics and argumentation with which the discipline has inducted academics, describing the discipline of the humanities, especially critical literary and linguistic interpretation, and evaluation, as a discipline of playful blasphemy. “However, our provenance of intellectual politics – argumentation and polemics in the field – is in search of philosophical truth, even in its most relative qualitative and quantitative values both interiorly and exteriorly in the integrated problematic written, verbal, speech, text or discourse works produced by others in language. For each of the works is a product of the federated unconscious. And they are both timeless and time-bound requiring the services of intellectual middle agents like us to disseminate or to ovulate them to both the educated and the lay-reading or watching audience. And, unavoidably, our radical criticism, dangerous as it is, is the grounds upon which we earn our income, even though our eight months of salary for 2022 is still being withheld by the Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government”, he added.
Scratching the surface of his paper, Fashina pointed out that “Text, Grammatology and Automation of Theories…” is the nucleus of his eclectic research and scholarship in the last 34 years of his intellectual hunger and search for qualitative knowledge, across the universities he has worked, attesting, “Ibadan is the very university city of magnificent learning where I attained academic full stature. The oak was once an acorn!” “In 34 years of University lectureship, 10 of which I spent in Ado Ekiti (1988-1998), in fulfillment of my postgraduate scholarship bond, I have careered a devoted and creative application of existing theories and principles of literary and linguistic interpretation of texts, in the vast fields of comparative literary theory and text-stylistics, semiotics and structuralism, psychoanalysis, with reference to African/black discourses (from the genres of fiction, drama, poetry, proverbs and the outlandish poetic of Ifa literary and divination corpus. The objective of my research and publication is to unpack the overt and covert meaning of any text”, he added.
He took time to list the great names in scholarship who trained him but regretted to point out, “No thanks to the “brain drain” that was mid-wived by the mass emigration of sound scholars of the great intellectual tradition of Ibadan in the 1980s to the diaspora for the golden fleece of true scholarship and economic sustainability. And the unfortunate reason is the poor welfare conditions to which the various successive governments of Nigeria have always subjected university teachers and administration. The greater consequence is the epidemic of incessant ‘grammar of strikes’ played out in the mutual combative struggle of the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities (ASUU) in carrying the cudgel of angst against the Nigerian government and the cronies.”
According to him, the fallout of the ASUU-FG face-off, which is currently hibernating due to judicial intervention, resulted in the students not being properly taught and academically immersed. He attributed the poor performance of students in the somewhat rushed examination that was conducted in Nigerian universities last semester to the ASUU-FG total and comprehensive strike.
He explained, “No sooner than ASUU called off the 8-month tenure of strike did the Nigerian universities rush to complete the prescribed curriculum for each course in speed time. The universities forced students into a contraption of semester examinations for which they were not properly prepared. This action by Nigerian universities betrays the fact that it takes time for the cognitive aspect of social and academic learning to get introjected, internalised and sublimated for reproductive regurgitation and creative application by the students. Such a university learning situation cannot produce excellence. Thus, within my intellectual purview of ASUU’s existential grammar are lexical sets of nouns, verbs and adjectives such as ASUU strike (as the nodal item in the collocational chain of words/lexemes), “suspension of strike”, “call off strike”, “roll-over strike”, “strike update”, “ASUU/FG Agreement”, ASUU meeting”, “NEC meeting”, “negotiation negotiation”, “deadlock”, “IPPIS”, “University autonomy”, “excess work-load”, “minimum wage”, “withheld salaries”, industrial court”, “ASUU meeting”, etc.”
Spelling out the consequences of incessant strikes in Nigerian universities, the inaugural lecturer stated, “It is in the prospect of reality that incessant strikes may only produce first-class graduates with ‘agrotat’ knowledge. They are disadvantaged from the required systematic and consistent academic tutorship and mentorship that may provoke and produce the innate ability and genius in them. Therefore, I aver that when Federal Government allows industrial negotiation to degenerate into the automatization of strikes in our universities through the breakdown of healthy grammar of relationship, negotiation, agreement and implementation between ASUU and the FG, it causes a dangerous deviation from the norm of academic excellence in Nigeria, with the historical affiliation to high standard British-styled education system.”
Delving into the thrust of his paper, Fashina theorised, conceptualised, and clarified both the major and minor variables in the title of his paper. According to him, “a text is governed by certain internal laws of linguistic cohesion and coherence to make it qualify to become worthy as a text”, adding, “The text, therefore, is the highest hierarchy of linguistic writing or communication that conform to the rules of coherence and cohesion that are constitutive of their powerful textuality.” To him, from this perspective, “a whole novel of 700 pages is a text. A group of five sentences that satisfy the criteria of cohesion and coherence occupied this status as a text. A poem is a text. A drama work is a text. They become text as long as they conform to the rules of coherence and cohesion that are constitutive of their powerful textuality.”
He, therefore, explained, “Cohesion is a criterion whereby a text must display functional collocation and unity of its grammatical elements in writing or speech. He listed cohesive items to include the elements of coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, relative pronouns, reflexives, either in anaphoric or cataphoric relations, and other taxonomies within the paradigmatic axis of chain and choice, as the ties or lexical relationships that bind a text together. Coherence is demonstrated in the way a text displays unity of its ideational propositions through linkers, repeated forms, substitution, ellipsis and co-reference of its lexical properties. To him, “Grammatology is an anti-grammar that seeks to deconstruct the idea of forms, principles, structures, and laws that govern both language and creativity in language use. It seeks to dismantle the hierarchies of knowledge on society and the universe.”
He explains, “Grammatical correctness/felicity bears inextricable tie with the production of great literary works, because the scholarship of critical interpretation, appreciation, evaluation and criticism should be anchored on precise rules of grammar, elocution, and pragma-logic that linguistics/context linguistics/and pragma-semiotics can offer. In literary scholarship, textuality refers to explicit presence of a system of stylo-linguistic rules, principles, and norms that operate on implicit and explict ideas, actions, behaviours, relationships, both comely and ludicrous, that the creative writer of Literature deploys to make their work earn the status of Literature.”
Having conceptualized the variables of the title of his lecture, he informed his audience, “My research and publications attempt to recover the lost paths of Literature or literary text analysis and return it to its high command level of semantic, semiotic and structural plasticity, and ideological balances. This has been a major aspect of the overriding provenance of my research in the last 34 years, using the rudiments of close and explicit analysis of both form and contents of literary texts, mainly texts of African kinship or its hybrid.”
Fashina lists some areas he has theorised in both literature and language to include Oral/Written (ORT/WRT) Text Transformational Process”, Deconstruction of Social-Linguistic Logic, Text, Ideology and the Burden of African Literary Identity, The Post (-) Colonial Rape on Literary Criticism, Semiotic Model of Literary Analysis, My Models of Literary Analysis, Theory of Genderised “sex of the text”, Automation of Language in Literary Text Analysis, From Text to Theory: Gramma(r)-tology as the Altar of Literary Analysis, Automation of Language in Literary Text Analysis, Literature: the Word as a Sacred Text, XYZ Interpretive Model on IFÁ Corpus, SFG as Formal Engineering Tools for Literary Analysis, Text and Discourse in Literary Interpretation, Identity of Art, and the Origin of Fear and Death in Ifá Mythopoeic Discourse”.
Concluding, Fashina used a Yoruba mythology story as narrated in Ifa corpus, “Oyeku Meji”, to illustrate and draw a conclusion on the 2023 presidential election, without mincing words that none of the presidential candidates is a saint. He berated the nation for its failure to organise a credible election as his assessment of the nation’s last presidential election is negative. He strongly holds the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) culpable in the series of irregularities that characterised the election, of which Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu has become the primary benefactor of the incredible election as the incoming president of Nigeria.
He concluded, “This is the sad story of our nation, our world, and of humanity, as engineered in the grammar of this Ifá scientific story – a product of our advanced pre-colonial African philosophy of sculpting the existentialist problem of human society. From this Ifatory, we can generate our indigenous body of knowledge. It is time our universities and research institutions began to explore a more advanced and a more practised devotion to our indigenous knowledge production system. That is the most epistemic aspect of the results of my research, teaching, and publications in the last 34 years of cumulative university lectureship. I am inclined to ask my wise audience this evening: without God, what does it all add up to in our algebraic equation of life achievements and academic glory? Your answer is as good as mine – IT IS ALL VANITY! If it is all vanity, then, I ask rhetorically as in the Book of Psalm 2:1 “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?”
