Biọdun Jeyifo (1946-2026): Tribute to an Accomplished Scholar and Activist
By Akin Adeṣọkan
The world of arts and letters, the African part of it in particular, lost a leading figure on Wednesday, February 11, 2026, with the death of Biọdun Jeyifo, Marxist cultural theorist, a major scholar of global postcoloniality, emeritus professor of African and African American Studies and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, Massachusetts. BJ, as he was popularly and universally called, died of renal failure about six weeks after his 80th birthday. During that birthday celebration in Lagos on January 5, he participated fully in the day-long series of activities, his usual energy, warmth, humor, and grace on effortless display.
A regular presence at African Literature Association meetings in the late 1980s and the latter half of the 1990s, BJ mentored at least three generations of graduate students in Nigeria, the US, and other places over more than four decades of active research, teaching and service. He retired from Harvard University at the end of the spring semester in 2019.
Born in Ibadan on January 5, 1946, Professor Jeyifo had his elementary, secondary, and tertiary education in that city, attending the University of Ibadan where he graduated with a First-Class honor in English, the third person to achieve that feat in the history of the department. That record remained unbroken for at least three decades. After a brief stint as a graduate student at Ibadan, he enrolled at New York University for his doctoral degree, studying with Richard Schechner, the pre-eminent theater scholar, and completing it in a record three years. Returning to Nigeria, he taught for two years at his alma mater, before moving to the then-University of Ifẹ (now Ọbafẹmi Awolọwọ University). He had moved to Harvard in 2006 from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, where he taught as a professor of English for eighteen years, starting in 1988. He also held teaching or research positions at Indiana University Bloomington, Freie University of Berlin, Peking University in China, and many other places.
While at Ifẹ, he was close colleagues with Wọle Ṣoyinka, the 1986 Nobel laureate in Literature (and his undergraduate teacher), the novelist Kọle Ọmọtọ ṣọ, and a host of others. During his ten-year stay at the university, he also published two pathbreaking monographs on drama: By Popular Demand: The Yoruba Traveling Theater of Nigeria (1984) and The Truthful Lie: Essays in the Sociology of African Drama (1985) and numerous academic and journalistic essays. His other books include Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity (2001), Conversations with Wole Soyinka (2001) Modern African Drama: A Norton Critical Edition (2002), Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism (2004), Africa in the World, The World in Africa (2011), an edited collection dedicated to the late Abiọla Irele, and Against the Predators' Republic: Political and Cultural Journalism 2007-2013 (2016).
In radical publishing and unionist activism Jeyifo also recorded quite notable and meaningful achievements. In 1980, he became the first president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, Nigeria’s main association of university professors, traveling across the country for meetings and consultations, and bringing the union in alliance with the larger Nigerian Labor Congress. He was a notable figure in the Ifẹ University’s progressive circles, and a founding member of the editorial collective that published the radical journal, Positive Review. Though close to Ṣoyinka in personal terms and serving as a co-editor of Art, Dialogue, and Outrage (1988), the playwright’s first major collection of essays, Jeyifo was a relentless, principled critic of his former teacher’s writings, and he became the world’s leading authority on the playwright’s work. He was finalizing another summative monograph on Ṣoyinka’s career when he passed away. At Ifẹ, Jeyifo wrote and directed plays, and wrote scores of performance reviews of plays by other authors, including Fẹmi Ọ ṣọfisan. As a deeply engaged activist, he was active in an underground revolutionary movement committed to social change in Nigeria, details of which are not yet widely known, but have been defining for his intellectual and ideological disposition.
Jeyifo was a man of boundless energy, and a real delight to observe in action, either in the classroom or at the lectern. Marxism was fundamental to his intellectual formation, but his was a non-dogmatic, relentlessly questioning type, and he brought his historical-materialist self-fashioning to bear on his scholarship. Writing about Jeyifo in 2018, the literary scholar Tẹjumọla Ọlaniyan wrote: "Apart from Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, there is arguably no other scholar more attentive to the radically dispersed accents or strands of thinking the postcolonial than Jeyifo….” Ọlaniyan, himself a former student of Jeyifo, wrote further that “[i]t is in the work of Jeyifo that you will find the most consistently balanced sense of the field of postcolonial discourse, the most insistent reminder and relativization that the poststructuralist version is just one in a long line and large pool of many articulations of the global problematic of modernity from the point of view of the formerly colonized, which is really what postcolonialism…is all about in its conceptually richer and non-chronological
understanding."
Before the final burial in Ibadan on Wednesday, March 4, a committee of BJ’s friends organized an evening of tributes in commemoration of his life as a teacher, scholar, unionist, friend, and parent. His immediate family returned to Nigeria and were joined by his former colleagues in the teachers’ union, as well as friends from his social circles. A highlight of the evening was the tribute by Ṣoyinka, who bucked Yoruba customary practice that frowned at an elder’s appearance at the final rites of someone younger. Ṣoyinka repeated the gesture the following day by leading a procession of members of the National Association of Seadogs (also known as Pyrates Confraternity) to give Jeyifo a full “pyratical burial”!
At 80, BJ could be said to have more years ahead of him still, and his death in fact came as a
shock to many of his friends and former students. He died accomplished, however, and the 80th birthday celebration in early January is, in retrospect, a befitting deed of gratitude for
his life of service.