Funso Aiyejina

Funso Aiyejina (1 January 1949 – 1 July 2024) was a Nigerian poet, short story writer, playwright and academic. He was Dean of Humanities and Education (until his retirement in 2014) and Professor Emeritus at the University of the West Indies. His collection of short fiction, The Legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories, won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book (Africa). Quotes Ososo prepared me for the world, especially the Caribbean. At an altitude of 1,236 feet above sea level, the Nigerian town of Ososo is often described in terms of its temperate climate and its mesmerising parade of rockhills. But neither the climate nor the beauty of its landscape was the reason for its choice as a permanent abode for waves of people fleeing precolonial civil wars or spear-wielding, horse-riding, net-casting slavecatchers. Settlers in Ososo did not have the luxury of feasting on the majestic beauty of rockhills, or of luxuriating in the soothing embrace of the morning breeze. Their minds and feet were hungry for only one thing: sanctuary, provided by the many caves. Each wave of refugees contributed its language and culture to create a complex community of multiple languages and rituals. On a typical market day, you were likely to hear a good percentage of the 15 languages spoken in the Akoko-Edo Local Government Area, not counting Yoruba (the lingua franca), Pidgin, and English! As a child, I looked forward to the eve of our annual masquerade festival. My father’s ‘big room’, with its three ritual stools, welcomed relatives, friends, and strangers from the villages and towns around us. There was food, millet brew, and a riot of languages. My paternal relatives from Okene spoke Ebira; my maternal relatives from Ogori spoke Ogori; everybody spoke Yoruba, and when we wanted to exclude our visitors from both maternal and paternal lines, we spoke Ososo. That democratic palaver of languages in the ‘big room’ and the wider Ososo society prepared me for my encounter with various Nigerian languages and cultural practices at school in Northern and Western Nigeria and for the multi-cultural temperament of the Caribbean. My conversation with the Caribbean began in the classrooms of the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) in the Yoruba city of Ile Ife. All English majors were required to take the Commonwealth Literature course. Edward Brathwaite, George Lamming, and V.S. Naipaul were on the reading list. The lecturer, Sam Omo Asein, had just returned with an MA from York University, Canada, where he focused on Caribbean Literature. His enthusiasm for the Caribbean segment of the course, especially for Brathwaite, was infectious. I have him to thank for my lifelong interest in Caribbean literature and culture, in the same way I owe my love of poetry, especially the poetry of Christopher Okigbo, to Imeh Ikiddeh, and my social consciousness to Tunji Adebayo, both of whom also taught me at Ife in my undergraduate years. I am not a diarist. I only remember events that have transformed into metaphors. Like that trip from Port of Spain back to the University of the West Indies campus at St Augustine in my first few months in Trinidad in 1977. After Acadia University, Nova Scotia (1975/76), where I was in a sea of whiteness (also my first experience of winter and snow), I was glad to be in a country where my skin did not Other me. That evening, I had gone over to Port of Spain to meet with a new friend-interest. After the ice-cream-and-banana-split date, I got into a taxi at Independence Square to head back to St Augustine. I was in the back seat with two other passengers. While they were there, I could keep quiet. Halfway to St. Augustine they disembarked, and now I had to respond to the driver’s chat. The moment I spoke, he announced, ‘You is from Africa!’ Well, well, well, the colour of my accent had given me away. His questions came fast and furious. I gladly answered them. They were nothing like those I had to answer in Canada, that night on the 9th floor of Cromwell Tower, when it was our turn to host the weekend floor-party. The questioner then was a member of the football team – the Axemen. After I told him I was Nigerian, he wanted to know how come I spoke English? Where, when, and how did I learn to speak English? I flashed back to my undergraduate Commonwealth Literature course when we had to read books by Canadian, Indian and West Indian writers, among others. I took a deep breath, looked straight into his soul, and announced that just before I boarded the plane in Lagos for Canada, I was given an injection of English and by the time I landed at Halifax, I had become a fluent speaker. Never did find out if he keyed into the sarcasm, but we did become friends enough for him to invite me on a weekend visit to his family on Prince Edward Island. The taxi driver’s questions, however, were sophisticated – about history, politics and life in Africa. He wanted to know about Nelson Mandela, Kwame ‘Nukrumah’, Julius ‘Kneeyerere’. ‘What do Africans think of us?’ As we approached my drop-off point, I stretched over to pay. The streetlights were already on, his gaze was on the road (evidence he was not keen on night driving), but his mind was on the conversation. A happy smile reflected back to me from the rear-view mirror as he announced, ‘You is the first African from the homeland to ride in my car. The ride is on the house.’ I thanked him as he pulled over to let me out, but he was off before I could get his name. I went back to the taxi stand a number of times, hoping to find him. I never did. Less than three years after that experience, I would complete a PhD thesis on ‘The Image of Africa in West Indian Literature’, but nothing in the literature came anywhere close to that episode in shaping my understanding of what Africa means to conscious New World Africans. I had been accepted to study at all three campuses of the University of the West Indies. Until the very last minute, Jamaica was my choice. In those days in Nigeria, every West Indian was a Jamo. I considered Barbados because of Edward Brathwaite (I didn’t know him as Kamau at that time) and George Lamming, whose works I had studied in that same undergraduate Commonwealth Literature course. Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin exposed me to a range of Caribbean emotional and political responses to enslavement, colonialism, and independence. Brathwaite’s Masks showed me how to create visceral modern poetry from African history and culture and how to smash conventions. I learnt from Brathwaite that it was okay to break up words and sentences to liberate the truth buried in them. Trinidad was my third choice. Naipaul was my only reference point and our lecturer at Ife, although he praised the work, was lukewarm about him. It would be years before I could figure out his unenthusiastic attitude to Naipaul, the man.