Akin Adesokan: In praise of diligence and grit, By Kunle Ajibade

Professor Akin Adesokan

When Akin was in primary school at St John’s Anglican School, Onibon-Nla, a village near Ibadan, books always fascinated him and he read them voraciously. Although he did not grow up surrounded by books, he had a habit of persistently harassing his teachers for novels whenever he saw them reading them. In half a day in primary two in 1974, he read D.O. Fagunwa’s Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmole. He could not sleep at night because he was haunted by the daemons in the novel. Subsequently, fully enraptured by the eloquence of Fagunwa, he memorised some passages in this 1950 novel in the luminous of his solitude. The passages he memorised have stayed with him ever since. He thought that the saga of Akara-ogun, the fearless hunter, was piercingly real. He also thought that the novel was history, that it was autobiography. It was not until he got to primary four that his inspirational teacher, Mr Akinola, explained to him the nature and phenomenon of literature. It was this mentor who told him that the fictional world is a world of make-believe. A lie that feeds on truth. This man of letters, teaching innocent kids in that village, a village that had produced Areoye Oyebola, former editor of Daily Times and the author of Blackman’s Dilemma, was the one who explained to Akin in Yoruba many aspects of the art of fiction such as point of view, plot, characterisation, dialogue, interior monologue, showing and telling, magical realism, and intertextuality. Like a sponge, Akin soaked everything in.

One day, outside of the classroom, he shared his excitement with Mr Akinola after listening to a new album of Lanrewaju Adepoju’s poetry. To his surprise, Mr Akinola quickly waved it off and said that Adebayo Faleti was the master. It was Akin’s first time hearing Falet’s name. Akinola then nudged him to read the other four novels of Fagunwa, the novels by Isaac O. Delano, works of J. F. Odunjo, and other Yoruba classics. He also encouraged him to listen to folktales, songs and music. Today, many of the songs of his years of childhood help Akin to recollect and compartmentalise the joys and sorrows of those days, or what Pablo Neruda calls “the beauty that blossoms in the dark.” During his years at the Community High School, Eleshinfunfun, one of the schools that the government of Oyo State built when Uncle Bola Ige was the governor, Akin simply built on the solid foundation of the training he received from Mr Akinola. In that school, he out-read many of his peers and some of his teachers. He organised a reader’s club with his classmates and was very active in the Literary and Debating Society. He was the first student librarian of that school. It was in that small library that he read Wole Soyinka’s easy plays, some novels of Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Chukwuemeka Ike and others.

His creative gift and diligence combined to make his first-degree programme in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Ibadan a cakewalk. As a star student, he was close to professors Dapo Adelugba, Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare and Bode Sowande. He also had interesting literary groundings with Dr Harry Garuba. He was a campus journalist. Akin got lost in the forest of books, reading, with careful attention, more of the works of William Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Wole Soyinka, Harold Pinter, JP Clark, Joseph Brodsky, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Femi Osofisan, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, among others. One day, he read in Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs that the writing profession is hard. That a writer is like a fisherman “who looks for the river, and if he finds it frozen over, he has to drill a hole in the ice. He must have a good deal of patience, weather the cold and the adverse criticism, stand up to ridicule, look for the deep water, cast the proper hook, and if after all that work, he pulls out a tiny little fish he must fish again, facing the cold, the water, the critic, eventually landing a bigger fish, and another and another.” Akin took Neruda seriously. He still does. In 1991, he graduated top of his class, winning the faculty of Arts Prize and National Council of Arts and Culture Prize.

Upon his graduation, he worked for a decade in the Nigerian media: Gongola State Television, The Guardian, TheNEWS,TEMPO, TNT, ThisDAY and The Post Express. In the course of doing his legitimate job as a journalist, he was detained in Ikoyi prison in 1993 and at the Awolowo Road office of the State Security Service (SSS). President Bill Clinton had his detention in mind when he paid Akin a tribute in his speech at the grand dinner organised for him in Abuja when he visited Nigeria during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency. He praised him and others for fighting courageously for democracy. As difficult as it was to practise journalism under the dictatorships of Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha, Akin never stopped working on his creative writings. He wrote several drafts of his first novel, Roots in the Sky, under the agonising condition of tyranny. Indeed, when one of the handwritten drafts got stuck in an office of The Guardian which was then shut down by General Abacha, Akin promptly commenced writing a new draft. His hard work paid off in the end, for in 1996, Roots in the Sky won The Association of Nigerian Authors Prize for Fiction. This novel was later published by Festac Books. When Akin won that prize, I was serving life imprisonment in Makurdi prison because of a story published by TheNEWS. Akin was gracious to dedicate his award to me as a way of campaigning for my release. I will remain grateful to him for that kind gesture, that fraternal solidarity. Two years later, he won the PEN Freedom-to-Write Award and Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett Human Rights Award.

From 200 to 2005, Akin was in Cornell University, Ithaca, USA, where he studied for his doctorate in literature under professor Biodun Jeyifo, who generally deepened his knowledge in literature and political economy and affirmed his left leaning vision of the world. Shortly after his programme in Cornell in 2005, he got a job at Indiana University-Bloomington as an assistant professor of comparative literature. He has been working hard as an academic, a creative writer, a public intellectual and a builder of cultural institutions. He writes occasionally for TheNEWS, Premium Times, Africa is a Country and Chimurenga. He has contributed many insightful peer-reviewed articles to reputable journals and books. He has co-edited with professor Adeleke Adeeko Celebrating D.O. Fagunwa: Aspects of African and World Literary History which Bookcraft published in 2017. Over the years, Akin has completed two other interesting novels titled Underground System and South Side, and a brilliant non-fictional book on Lagos titled How Fast Can I Get to Ruxton Road? Bookcraft has just published The Age of White Rulers, his English translation of Isaac O. Delano’s Yoruba novel, Aiye Daiye Oyinbo. Indiana University Press has published two magnificent specialist books by Akin Adesokan: Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics and Everything Is Sampled: Digital and Print Mediations in African Arts and Letters. Broadly, in the first book, Adesokan reflects on the nature of cultural productions in the era of globalisation using the works of Sembene Ousmane, C.L.R. James, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Arundhati Roy, Caryl Phillips and Tunde Kelani to make his case. In the second book, which is an interdisciplinary study, he expands the scope of his cultural analysis to include careful descriptions of the liberal uses of the current technological inventions and devices in the productions, marketing, consumption, preservation and curation of African Arts, films, videos, dramas and festivals. Here he offers criticism and appreciation of the works of musicians, painters, curators, playwrights and directors. On 14 June this year the trustees of Indiana University-Bloomington approved the promotion of Akin Adesokan from associate professor to full professor of comparative literature and professor of cinema and media studies.

For Akin’s diligence and grit, a big round of applause.

Kunle Ajibade is the Executive Editor/Director of TheNEWS/PM NEWS.

This is the introduction of Professor Akin Adesokan made at the Lagos Book and Art Festival on 15 November 2024.